Fri, May 10, 2024 page12

• Pura 70 shows China’s chip progress

  • Reuters, SHENZHEN and SHANGHAI
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  Huawei Technologies Co’s (華為) latest high-end smartphone features more Chinese suppliers, including a new flash memory chip and an improved chip processor, a teardown analysis showed, pointing to the progress China is making toward technology self-sufficiency.

  The inside of Huawei’s Pura 70 Pro was examined by online tech repair company iFixit and consultancy TechSearch International, finding components made by Chinese suppliers.

  The firms also found that the Pura 70 phones run on an advanced processing chipset made by Chinese chip foundry Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) called the Kirin 9010, which is likely a slightly improved version of the advanced chip used by Huawei’s Mate 60 series.

  

  Staff members of iFixit dismantle a Huawei Pura 70 Pro smartphone for a teardown analysis in Shenzhen, China, on April 19.

  Photo: Reuters

  “While we cannot provide an exact percentage, we’d say the domestic component usage is high, and definitely higher than in the Mate 60,” iFixit lead teardown technician Shahram Mokhtari said.

  “This is about self-sufficiency, all of this, everything you see when you open up a smartphone and see whatever are made by Chinese manufacturers, this is all about self-sufficiency,” Mokhtari said.

  The Pura 70 series launched late last month and quickly sold out.

  Earlier analysis by teardown firms such as TechInsights of the Mate 60, launched in August last year, found that the phone used DRAM and NAND memory chips made by South Korea’s SK Hynix.

  SK Hynix said at the time that it no longer works with Huawei, and analysts said the chips likely came from stockpiles.

  The Pura 70 still contains a DRAM chip made by SK Hynix while the NAND flash memory chip was likely packaged by Huawei’s in-house chip unit, HiSilicon (海思), with each NAND die bearing a 1-terabit capacity, iFixit and TechSearch found.

  This is comparable to products made by major flash memory producers such as SK Hynix, Kioxia and Micron.

  “In our teardown, our chip ID expert has identified it as a particular HiSilicon chip,” Mokhtari said.

  The processor used by the Puro 70 Pro suggests that Huawei might have only made incremental improvements to its ability to produce an advanced chip with Chinese partners in the months since it launched the Mate 60 series, iFixit and TechSearch said.

  The processor is similar to the one in the Mate 60 series, which used SMIC’s 7-nanometer N+2 manufacturing process, they said.

  “This is significant, because news of the 9000S on 7-nanometer nodes caused a bit of a panic last year when US lawmakers were confronted with the possibility that the sanctions imposed on Chinese chipmakers might not slow their technological progress after all,” iFixit said.

  “The fact that the 9010 is still a 7-nanometer process chip, and that it’s so close to the 9000S, might seem to suggest that Chinese chip manufacturing has indeed been slowed,” iFixit added.

  Huawei should not be underestimated, as SMIC is still expected to make a leap to a 5-nanometer manufacturing node before the end of the year, Mokhtari said.
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