The HiSilicon Kirin 9010 processor inside the Huawei Pura 70 smartphones is also produced by SMIC using 7nm technology

The Huawei Pura 70 family smartphones presented last week were logically equipped with the most modern HiSilicon processors of their own design, and for American officials the intrigue was whether SMIC retained the ability to produce 7-nm chips under the sanctions. According to third-party experts, 7nm processors are again seen inside new Huawei smartphones.

Let us recall that the debut of the Huawei Mate 60 family of smartphones at the beginning of last fall alarmed American officials, as third-party experts established that they were built on the basis of 7-nm HiSilicon Kirin 9000s chips produced by the Chinese company SMIC. For the US authorities, such activity is undesirable, since they believe that the local military-industrial complex can use the technology, which is advanced by the standards of the Chinese semiconductor industry, to its own interests.

According to Bloomberg, TechInsights specialists opened one of the Huawei Pura 70 smartphones, finding a HiSilicon Kirin 9010 processor inside, which has signs of being manufactured using 7nm technology. Experts come to this conclusion after studying the internal structure of the chip using a microscope, since otherwise it is problematic to understand by what technology it was made. Therefore, SMIC has the opportunity to expand the range of 7-nm products, although the authorities in the USA, the Netherlands and Japan are trying in every possible way to limit this contract manufacturer’s access to advanced lithography equipment. TechInsights experts say with a high degree of confidence that the Pura 70 family of smartphones contains Kirin 9010 processors manufactured using 7nm technology in the N+2 variant. New Huawei smartphones are very popular in China; the first batch was sold out in just a couple of days.