Secretive Huawei pulls off 5G phone comeback amid US sanctions 華為在美國製裁下成功捲土重來5G手機 By Bien Perez, senior production editor with the SCMP’s technology desk

Huawei Technologies last December was widely reported as having finally run out of advanced, in-house-designed semiconductors for its 5G smartphones, as tightened US trade sanctions effectively cut the company’s access to such chips developed or produced using American technology, from anywhere.

That resulted in Huawei getting barred from obtaining advanced integrated circuits (ICs) from major contract chip makers, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co or Samsung Electronics. Privately-held Huawei and chip design arm HiSilicon were added to the US government’s trade blacklist, known as the Entity List, in 2019.

Fast-forward to this week, and Huawei has pulled off a surprise comeback to the 5G smartphone market with the low-key launch on Tuesday of its Mate 60 Pro, which it touted as the world’s first smartphone to support satellite calls.

While Huawei declined to provide details about the handset’s processor or on whether it supports 5G mobile networks, a product teardown and tests conducted by Chinese benchmarking website AnTuTu found that the central processing unit (CPU) in the latest Mate smartphone is the Kirin 9000s from HiSilicon. The chip has a 12-core configuration and a top clock speed of 2.62 gigahertz, according to AnTuTu.

Although HiSilicon’s website did not provide any information about that CPU, the firm’s existing Kirin 9000 and 9000e chipsets both support 5G connectivity and artificial intelligence applications, and are built on the advanced 5-nanometer manufacturing process.

The new Mate’s graphics processing unit was identified as another Chinese-designed chip, the Maleoon 910, according to AnTuTu, which did not provide details.

Huawei’s deliberate silence on these advanced components has become the subject of intense speculation in China, as questions abound about where and how the chip was made.

This secrecy also reflected the lengths that Huawei has taken to guard the source of these chips, as the Shenzhen-based firm quietly revives its smartphone business.

The Mate 40 series, released in October 2020 and powered by the Kirin 9000 CPU, was the last 5G smartphone launched by Huawei before the Mate 60 Pro.

Huawei’s suspected chip production plans were already under scrutiny late last year after the company filed a patent application for an advanced lithography system, a key chip-making technology for producing cutting-edge ICs.

Before that, several media reports said Huawei was collaborating with various parties to produce chips.

Huawei allegedly teamed up with Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co, a memory chip maker, to refit its production facilities to make processors and other logic chips, according to a September Nikkei report, which cited anonymous sources.

Washington was said to have launched an investigation into memory chip maker Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp over suspicions that it was supplying components to Huawei in contravention of sanctions, according to a Financial Times report in April last year.

This week, however, speculation was rife that Huawei supplier Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp, which operates mainland China’s largest chip foundry, might have progressed in making more advanced chips using less-advanced, but commercially available deep ultraviolet lithography systems.

As speculation about its chip strategy heats up, Huawei still faces the big challenge of convincing plenty of consumers who have switched to other Chinese 5G smartphone brands and Apple in the past few years to reconsider its latest product in the market. In early 2020, Huawei briefly surpassed Samsung to lead global smartphone shipments.