The Canadian communication platform TechInsights has earned the respect it receives from technology media around the world. At the end of the day, their technicians were the first to achieve identify integration technology used by SMIC to manufacture the Kirin 9000S SoC for Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro smartphone. In September 2023, that discovery raised clouds of dust because outside of China it was not known that SMIC already had the capacity to produce 7nm chips.
What TechInsights has just done is not as shocking as that revelation, but it is important because to a certain extent it reflects the state of the Chinese memory chip market. China currently has several memory semiconductor manufacturers with a competitive portfolio. Fujian Jinhua and Changxin Memory Technologies (CXMT) are two of the most important, and, logically, they seek to compete head-to-head with the companies that dominate this sector: the South Korean Samsung and SK Hynix, and the American Micron Technology.
The memory chips for Huawei’s Mate 70 Pro have been manufactured by SK Hynix
A good part of the DRAM and NAND memory chips integrated by Huawei in the latest mobile phones that it has placed on the market have been produced by Chinese companies, such as the two that I mentioned in the previous paragraph. However, according to TechInsights, Huawei’s Mate 70 Pro family smartphones incorporate DRAM and NAND integrated circuits manufactured by SK Hynix. A priori it is surprising because, as we have just seen, Chinese mobile phone and computer manufacturers already have memory chips produced by Chinese companies at their disposal.
The microarchitecture of these semiconductors requires using very advanced lithographic processes to fine-tune them.
However, it is important that we do not overlook that CXMT and Fujian Jinhua, as well as the other Chinese producers of memory ICs, cannot yet mass produce some types of memory, such as HBM chips (High Bandwidth Memory) that accompany GPUs for artificial intelligence (AI) or DDR5 memories. The microarchitecture of these semiconductors requires using very advanced lithographic processes to get them ready, and certainly the inability to access the best photolithography equipment produced by the Dutch company ASML makes it difficult for Chinese memory manufacturers to produce large scale of these and other cutting-edge memory chips.
Jeongdong Choe, senior analyst at TechInsights, has confirmed that SK Hynix has manufactured the Mate 70 Pro’s DRAM memory chips using its 14nm lithography and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) equipment. Currently, the Chinese semiconductor manufacturer SMIC is capable of producing 7nm integrated circuits using a technique known as multiple patterningbut everything seems to indicate that in this case the problem does not lie in the nanometers; It is caused by the limitation in production performance imposed on Chinese memory chip manufacturers by the impossibility of using EUV equipment to optimize their processes.
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