Huawei planning on using SMIC to fab 7nm ICs this year

Huawei  plans to fab 5G chips on a 7nm process at SMIC this year, reports the Nikkei.

The chips are not expected to be in phones on the market until next year.

Last year, SMIC used a 7nm process  to fab a  cryptocurrency mining chip for Bitmain Technologies.

The 7nm process Huawei is using  is thought to be SMIC’s N+1 process characterised  by  TechInsights as having Fin Pitch (FP), Contacted Poly Pitch (CPP) and Metal 2 Pitch (M2P) sizes either  larger or the same as TSMC’s N10  process. 

However Extensive Design Technology Co-Optimization (DTCO) features and high-density logic libraries enable a logic transistor density of 89 million transistors per square millimeter (89MT/mm^2), which is comparable to  TSMC’s N7 and Intel’s 10nm, which makes SMIC’s  N+1 process a  viable 7nm-class alternative for logicng SMziC to fab 7nm ICs this year