By David Kirton and Brenda Goh
SHENZHEN/SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Huawei’s latest high-end phone features more from Chinese suppliers, including a new flash memory storage chip and an upgraded chip processor, a teardown analysis showed, highlighting the company’s progress China towards technological self-sufficiency.
Online tech repair company iFixit and consultancy TechSearch International examined the inside of Huawei Technologies’ Pura 70 Pro for Reuters, finding a NAND memory chip that they said was likely packed with the internal chip unit from Chinese telecommunications equipment manufacturer HiSilicon and several other components manufactured by Chinese suppliers.
These results have not been reported previously.
Huawei’s resurgence in the high-end smartphone market after four years of US sanctions is widely watched by rivals and US politicians as it has become a symbol of growing trade frictions between the US and China and the China’s desire to achieve technological self-sufficiency.
The companies also discovered that the Pura 70 phones run on an advanced processing chipset made by Huawei called Kirin 9010, which is likely just a slightly improved version of the advanced Chinese-made chip used by Huawei’s Mate 60 series .
“While we can’t provide an exact percentage, we would say domestic component usage is high, and significantly higher than the Mate 60,” said Shahram Mokhtari, iFixit’s lead teardown technician.
“It’s about self-sufficiency, all of this, everything you see when you open a smartphone and see what’s being made by Chinese manufacturers, it’s about self-sufficiency,” Mokhtari said .
Huawei declined to comment.
Huawei launched the four Pura 70 smartphone models in late April and the series sold out quickly. Analysts say it will likely take more market share from iPhone maker Apple, while policymakers in Washington question the effectiveness of U.S. restrictions on the telecommunications equipment giant.
FLASH MEMORY CHIP MADE IN CHINA
Previous analysis by teardown companies such as TechInsights on the Mate 60, launched in August last year, revealed that the phone used DRAM and NAND memory chips made by South Korean company SK Hynix. SK Hynix said at the time that it no longer did business with Huawei and analysts said the chips likely came from inventory.
The Pura 70 still contains a DRAM chip made by SK Hynix, iFixit and TechSearch found, but the NAND flash memory chip was likely packaged by Huawei’s HiSilicon unit this time around and was made up of NAND chips of a capacity of 1 terabit each. This is comparable to products made by major flash memory producers such as SK Hynix, Kioxia and Micron.
However, the companies were not able to positively identify the wafer manufacturer because the markings on the NAND chip were unfamiliar, they added. But iFixit added that they believe HiSilicon could also have produced the memory controller.
“During our teardown, our chip identification expert identified it as a particular HiSilicon chip,” Mokhtari said.
SK Hynix reiterated that it has “strictly complied with the policies in place since the announcement of the restrictions against Huawei and has also suspended all transactions with the company since then.”
ADDITIONAL IMPROVEMENTS
IFixit and TechSearch’s analysis of the processor used by the Pura 70 Pro also suggests that Huawei may have made only incremental improvements in its ability to produce an advanced chip with Chinese partners in the months since the launch of the Mate 60 series.
The processor is similar to that used in the Mate 60 series which was produced for Huawei by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) using the Chinese foundry’s 7 nanometer (nm) N+2 manufacturing process, they said .
“This is important because news of the 9000S on a 7nm node caused a bit of panic last year when U.S. lawmakers faced the possibility that sanctions on Chinese chipmakers might ultimately not slow their technological advancements,” iFixit said.
“The fact that the 9010 is still a 7nm process chip and is so close to the 9000S could suggest that Chinese chip manufacturing has indeed been slowed down.”
He nevertheless warned against underestimating Huawei, saying that SMIC is still expected to make the jump to a 5nm manufacturing node before the end of the year.
SMIC did not respond to a request for comment.
(Additional reporting by Joyce Lee in Seoul; editing by Jacqueline Wong)
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