Mate 70 Launch: How China’s Huawei Made A Cutting-Edge Chip It Shouldn’t Have Been Able To

In late 2020, Huawei found itself in a desperate battle for survival. The Donald Trump administration had imposed stringent sanctions, severing the company’s access to critical semiconductor supply chains and effectively cutting off its ability to source the advanced chips needed to remain competitive in the smartphone market.

With its future hanging in the balance, Huawei made a bold move: it placed its entire $67 billion mobile and chip business on a risky partnership with Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), a Chinese foundry that was far behind industry leaders like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in terms of technology.

SMIC, despite its ambition, lacked the resources and cutting-edge capabilities of its global competitors. But it had a plan: to manufacture more advanced chips with older, less sophisticated equipment. The approach would be slow, costly, and untested, but it was Huawei's best shot at keeping its business afloat. Together, the two companies embarked on a high-stakes collaboration to develop a new smartphone chip, codenamed Charlotte.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Just weeks after the partnership was formed, in December 2020, SMIC was added to the US sanctions list, meaning any company wanting to supply it with technology would require approval from Washington.

With the Chinese Communist Party's pride at stake, SMIC was under immense pressure to master chip manufacturing technologies it had never before attempted.

Fast-forward nearly three years to August 2023, when Huawei made a stunning announcement: the release of the Mate 60 series. This smartphone, powered by the Kirin 9000S chip—formerly known as Charlotte—marked the culmination of years of defiance against sanctions. Despite the difficulties and risks involved in its production, the Kirin 9000S delivered performance on par with Qualcomm’s chips from just a generation or two earlier, according to testing reports.

The Mate 60 became an instant success in China, hailed as a symbol of resilience and innovation. Its rapid adoption demonstrated Huawei's remarkable return to the high-end smartphone market, a feat that many had once deemed impossible.

However, its release sparked confusion and concern in the United States, with analysts scrambling to understand how Huawei had managed to circumvent the restrictions and achieve such a technological breakthrough.

In the realm of chip fabrication, achieving a 7-nanometer process is the gold standard, a measure of cutting-edge technology. Companies like Apple and Tesla rely on such technology to produce their most advanced processors. SMIC, however, produced its own 7nm chips—the N+1 and N+2—under vastly different conditions.

The Kirin 9000S, powered by the N+2 process, was made using deep ultraviolet (DUV) machines, in stark contrast to the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) machines used by TSMC and Samsung. While EUV allows for greater precision and efficiency, DUV increases complexity and waste, resulting in higher production costs.

Huawei’s engineers played a crucial role in the success of this effort, working closely with SMIC at the Shanghai facility to help align chip designs with foundry specifications. Despite export restrictions preventing Americans from assisting, SMIC enlisted experts from Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Germany to improve productivity. These experts, with their experience in advanced foundries, contributed valuable knowledge to improve the thousands of steps involved in the 7nm process.

The production of the Kirin 9000S faced significant obstacles, including a modest 30 per cent yield in its early stages, well below the industry standard of 90 per cent. This low yield significantly increased production costs, but the project was buoyed by generous state subsidies. Huawei and SMIC received billions in financial support, signaling China’s commitment to advancing its semiconductor industry despite mounting global restrictions.

Huawei’s push for self-reliance goes a step further with the launch of of the Mate 70 smartphone series earlier today (26 November), which marked a new phase in its journey toward reducing dependence on foreign technology.

Powered by Huawei's HarmonyOS NEXT, the Mate 70 series boasts a 40 per cent performance improvement over previous models and further solidifies Huawei’s move away from Google services, which it lost access to in 2019 due to US sanctions.

Yet, even as Huawei’s technological self-sufficiency grows, new challenges are coming up. The US is expected to announce stricter export controls soon, potentially adding hundreds of Chinese chip companies to its trade blacklist, further restricting access to critical American suppliers.

The patriotic buzz around Huawei's tech breakthrough has fuelled its comeback, putting it in direct competition with Apple in China.

However, questions remain about how long it can stay competitive. For instance, some versions of the Mate 70 will feature Huawei’s Kirin 9100 chipset, built on a 6nm node, an upgrade from the 7nm Kirin 9000S chips used in the Mate 60 series. However, production challenges may limit its availability to higher-end models.

But Trump returning to the White House, Huawei’s growing self-reliance may be its only defense against the tightening grip of global sanctions.