China Snubs US With Banned Chip Tech

A pedestrian talks on the phone while walking past a Huawei Technologies Co. store in Beijing on Jan. 29, 2019. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Commentary

China’s two biggest telecom and chipmaking companies thumbed their noses at the United States on the day of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s visit to China. They released a new Huawei smartphone with 7-nanometer (nm) technology that flies in the face of international sanctions on exporting the tech to China.

Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro has a 5G-capable Kirin 9000S microchip produced by China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC)—most likely using U.S. technology banned by the Commerce Department for use in China.

The phone release is a snub of Ms. Raimondo just as she joined a long line of Biden administration officials trying to stabilize U.S.–China relations through a flurry of visits to Beijing.

Last year’s export controls against Huawei and SMIC attempted to limit China’s production of computer chips to the outdated 14-nm level, which is about eight years behind the most advanced chips now produced in the United States, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and the Netherlands.

According to Bloomberg, which commissioned a teardown of the Mate 60 Pro to discover which semiconductor it used, the phone’s production “raises questions about SMIC’s compliance with US rules stipulating that any company intending to supply Huawei using American technology—which is present throughout SMIC’s operations—must obtain Washington’s approval.”

The teardown, conducted by TechInsights, revealed that Huawei and SMIC produced the phone’s chip using 7-nm technology, a first for China. Bloomberg noted that the phone is “a sign Beijing is making early progress in a nationwide push to circumvent US efforts to contain its ascent.”

Huawei kept mum on the phone’s key technical specs, including the phone’s processor and connection speed, leading to questions about whether it’s hiding banned U.S. tech.

TechInsights reports that the Kirin 9000S’s 7-nm chip is only about five years behind the United States.

The company’s vice chair told Bloomberg that “SMIC’s technology advances are on an accelerated trajectory and appear to have addressed yield-impacting issues in their 7-nm technology.”

Testing by TechInsights showed that the new Huawei phone reached cellular speeds comparable to those of the latest Apple iPhone, which uses 4-nm technology.

Miniaturized circuitry smaller than 7 nm requires extreme ultraviolet lithography machines produced by the Netherlands-based ASML and used by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. They print tiny transistors on silicon wafers at an astonishing rate of more than 250 million per square millimeter. For comparison, the first transistor was invented by Bell Labs in 1947 and was about 5 inches tall.

China is prohibited from importing the extreme ultraviolet lithography tech and the 4-nm and 3-nm chips they produce.

There has, however, been some talk of China’s producing its own 5-nm chips. According to tech analyst Anton Shilov, “SMIC’s Twinscan NXT:2000i deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography scanners can make chips on 7nm and 5nm technologies, so that the company may have developed a 5nm-class fabrication process.”

Huawei and SMIC are making rapid headway into areas critical for artificial intelligence, including reportedly A100-style graphics processing units (GPUs) banned for export to China.

“Huawei’s compute GPU capabilities are now on par with Nvidia’s A100 GPUs, Liu Qingfeng, founder and chairman of Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company iFlytek, said at the 19th Summer Summit of the 2023 Yabuli China Entrepreneurs Forum (via IT Home),” Mr. Shilov said.

China’s semiconductors and operating systems are a threat to U.S. national security if they supply information infrastructure and smartphones internationally, along with backdoors that Beijing can insert for espionage and hacking.

Huawei has its own operating systems that compete with those based on the Apple, Microsoft, and Android systems.

If Huawei, SMIC, and their latest fabs can build semiconductors powerful enough for AI, they will doubtless supply the People’s Liberation Army with cyberwarfare and lethal drone technologies capable of autonomous surveillance and targeting. With SMIC’s 7-nm chip and Huawei’s GPUs, they’re well on their way.

The Raimondo snub shows yet again that the Biden administration underestimated the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is anti-free market and anti-democracy and responds only to economic and military force.

Despite U.S. sanctions and tariffs, Huawei’s technical progress indicates that U.S. and allied countermeasures should be strengthened for China and broadened to the level of international law. Democracies must control AI and the chips upon which it depends if they hope to contain the CCP’s totalitarianism, protect the world from Beijing’s goal of hegemony, and bring democracy and human rights improvements to China’s 1.4 billion people.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.