Latest news with #HiSilicon
Phone Arena
3 days ago
- Business
- Phone Arena
Huawei's next AP for the Mate 80 series rumored to have 20% hike in performance
Huawei's HiSilicon unit was once a highly regarded team of chip designers, and Huawei was TSMC's second-largest customer after Apple. Only now is Huawei trying to make a comeback after U.S. sanctions created a huge gap between smartphone SoCs designed by Apple, Qualcomm, MediaTek, and those designed by Huawei. The 7nm Kirin 9000S powering the Mate 60 series was released in 2023 and stunned many by bringing 5G support back to Huawei phones. The sanctions have limited what Huawei can do to improve its chips by preventing the company from obtaining advanced lithography machines, making it harder for complex circuitry patterns to be transferred onto silicon wafers. Following the release of the Kirin 9000S application processor (AP) with the Mate 60 line, all Huawei could do was change configurations on subsequent chips to get a boost in performance. The Kirin 9010 was introduced last year with the Pura 70 series. With the Mate 70 line came the Kirin 9020. The latter chip delivered a 40% improvement in performance over the Kirin 9000S, according to Huawei. The rumored Kirin 9030 AP is tipped to have a 20% performance boost over the Kirin 9020. | Image Credit-Weibo, Huawei Central Because of the sanctions, Huawei and foundry SMIC are not able to obtain an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine. This is part of the reason why Huawei can't close the gap with chips designed by aforementioned names like Apple, Qualcomm, and MediaTek. Huawei hopes to be able to use multiple impressions to make up for its inability to obtain advanced lithography systems. The problem with using multiple impressions is that it is very costly to use this technique. Misalignments lead to short circuits, which lead to lower yields, higher costs, and reliability problems. Nonetheless, with Huawei's chipsets 1-2 generations behind those from the top processor players, it hopes to have a 5nm chipset available, perhaps by the end of this year. Secure your connection now at a bargain price! We may earn a commission if you make a purchase Check Out The Offer
South China Morning Post
21-06-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
How Huawei's silicon strategy defies US sanctions to advance China's AI ambitions
Advertisement Huawei's advanced AI chip initiative, however, suddenly faced a major obstacle a year later in August 2020, when the US Commerce Department tightened restrictions by barring the sale of semiconductor products and services – sourced from anywhere with US technology – to the company and its affiliates without a requisite licence. As a result, Huawei supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co , the world's largest and most advanced contract chipmaker, ceased doing business with the Chinese firm and its integrated circuit (IC) design unit HiSilicon to comply with US curbs. At the time, the prognosis appeared dire for Huawei, according to some analysts. 'If enough companies comply globally, Huawei's ability to generate workarounds will be severely undercut, putting its continued existence as a viable commercial entity in doubt ,' said Paul Trolio of New York-based political risk consultancy Eurasia Group. Fast-forward to 2025, and Huawei has remained resilient in the face of US sanctions Huawei Technologies' Ascend 910 processor. Photo: Handout Jensen Huang , founder and CEO of AI chip giant Nvidia , has been the most prominent industry leader to recognise the resurgence of Huawei in the IC sector.
GSM Arena
12-06-2025
- GSM Arena
The Huawei Pura 80 Pro+ and Ultra are powered by Kirin 9020
Huawei just announced the Pura 80 family, including a new Ultra. As has become the norm for the company, it didn't reveal which chipsets are powering these phones – officially, Huawei only says that they are 36% faster than their Pura 70 counterparts and that's it. The Huawei Pura 80 Pro+ and 80 Ultra are powered by Kirin 9020 Folks over at Weibo already shared some hands-on photos with the Huawei Pura 80 Ultra, which is rumored to use the same chipset as the Pura 80 Pro+ – the Kirin 9020 that was also featured in the Mate 70 series. The Pura 70 series used the older Kirin 9010. Kirin 9020 is an in-house design from HiSilicon with three Taishan cores: Main (1 at 2.5GHz), Middle (three at 2.15GHz) and Little (four at 1.6GHz). Note that two bigger cores have hyperthreading and run two threads each – this is why some software shows them as 2+6+4 instead of the actual 1+3+4. The GPU is a Maleoon 920 at 840MHz. More evidence of the Kirin 9020 inside the Pura 80 Pro+ and Ultra It's not clear which chip is used in the Huawei Pura 80 Pro – it might be the same Kirin 9020, but we'll have to wait on confirmation for that. As for the vanilla Pura 80, some tipsters claim that it uses the Kirin 9020A, a down-clocked variant of the 9020 with its three CPU clusters running at 2.4GHz, 2.0GHz and 1.6GHz. The Pura 80 and 80 Pro are configured with 12GB of RAM. Storage ranges from 256GB base to 1TB. The Pura 80 Pro+ and Ultra have 16GB of RAM instead and 512GB or 1TB storage. All four run HarmonyOS 5.1. Source (in Chinese) | Via
Phone Arena
26-05-2025
- Phone Arena
China's SMIC may have used older lithography gear to build Huawei's new 5nm chip
China's largest foundry, SMIC, is also the third-largest foundry in the world. Thanks to U.S. and Dutch sanctions, the foundry cannot obtain cutting-edge lithography machines. Without the ability to use extreme ultraviolet lithography machines (EUV) to transfer circuitry patterns to silicon wafers, SMIC was believed to be limited to producing chips using its 7nm node. We are now in the middle of an interesting mystery. Huawei's new Mate Book Pro laptop runs HarmonyOS and is powered by the Kirin X90 chip designed by Huawei's HiSilicon chip design unit. One leaker says that the X90 is a repurposed Kirin 9010 with a different layout of the CPU cores. We should know for sure sometime over the next few days when in-depth reviews of the chip are expected to be released. The Kirin 9010 AP was used to power Huawei's photography-based Pura 70 flagship series that was released in April 2024 and it was built using SMIC's 7nm N+2 process node. Did SMIC really build a 5nm chip using DUV? | Image credit-X A tweet on "X" from leaker @Jukanlosreve credited Chinese state-run broadcaster CCTV with running the report about the 5nm node for the X90. Another X user, @zephyr_z9, claims that the Kirin X90 has a transistor density of 125 million transistors per mm2. That makes it less dense than TSMC's 5nm node (approximately 138 million transistors per mm2) but close to the density used with Samsung Foundry's 5nm node. What makes this amazing is that it appears to have been achieved using a DUV machine. Not all of the numbers were positive. One analyst reportedly discovered that SMIC is producing 3,000 wafers per month with an extremely low 20% yield. Most foundries want to see a minimum yield of 70% before starting mass production of a chip. Despite the anemic yield, if SMIC is able to produce 5nm chips using DUV, this will worry U.S. lawmakers who have been concerned about Huawei's ability to design cutting-edge silicon for the Chinese military and AI even with U.S. sanctions.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Suspected SK hynix HBM tech leaker arrested boarding flight to China
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A man suspected of attempting to smuggle SK hynix tech secrets to China was apprehended at South Korea's Incheon International Airport earlier this month. DigiTimes reports that the former employee subcontractor aimed to leak the firm's proprietary high-bandwidth memory (HBM) packaging technology to entities based in China. According to the source report, authorities had been aware of the activities of suspect 'Mr Kim' for several months. The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency's Industrial Technology Security Investigation Unit made the dramatic airport arrest, moments before flight boarding, and charged Kim with violating South Korea's trade secret and unfair competition laws. Its investigators say that Kim stole critical data about HBM at around the same time he resigned as a subcontractor at SK hynix, at the beginning of the year. Korean prosecutors allege that Kim kept printed and photographed records from his time at SK hynix. He went as far as removing SK hynix branding and 'confidential' markings from any material he captured, it is claimed. In total, reports say Kim was caught with a haul of 11,000 images from his time at SK hynix. Boldly, Kim is even said to have cited some of these stolen documents in job applications to Chinese firms, including Huawei's HiSilicon. Above, we mentioned that the stolen proprietary data was mostly about HBM technology. More precisely, the almost-leaked SK hynix secrets were focused on the backend packaging stage of HBM, and hybrid bonding techniques, says reports. HBM is widely used in AI accelerators, so it is understandable that Chinese rivals would covet SK hynix's work on fine-tuning the production of this kind of computer memory. The case of Mr Kim is possibly only the tip of the iceberg, and there have been several other high-profile tech leaks to China involving rival companies like Samsung, for example. South Korea already has reasonably strong deterrents to stem semiconductor IP theft. Individuals can face fines up to the equivalent of US$71,000 and up to 10 years behind bars. Harsher penalties and sentences can be imposed where strategic sectors fall victim to IP theft. Nevertheless, Korean authorities are making efforts to bolster legal deterrents, say reports.
