Huawei’s CEO of Consumer Business has confirmed that the company is all set to launch its upcoming flagship smartphone series — the Huawei Mate40 this fall, which means in the coming weeks. This was announced during 2020 Summit of the China Information Technology Association.
Along with that, he has also revealed that the upcoming Mate40 will be the last smartphone to come powered by the company’s high-end Kirin 9000 chipset as the company is planning to stop making them.
The development comes as the new sanctions on Huawei by the United States makes it impossible for the Chinese giant to manufacture high-end chips. In fact, TSMC, the world’s largest chipset manufacturer, has stopped taking new orders from Huawei since May this year.
However, it seems that the company won’t have issues in making mid-range chipsets under the Kirin brand given that Chinese manufacturers like SMIC are tasked with manufacturing them in the company’s home market.
But, the issue is that the technology and capability of companies like SMIC are limited at this time and cannot produce high-end chipsets. While flagship chipsets are currently based on the 5nm process, SMIC is working on the 14nm process for the Huawei HiSilicon Kirin 710A SoC.
Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei Consumer Business said that while the company made huge investments in Research & Development and went through a difficult journey to become one of the leading chipset brands, the company didn’t invest in semiconductor manufacturing. He added that Huawei did chip design but skipped on chip production.
SMIC, China’s largest foundry, is working to increase its production capacity and invest in the new technologies. There’s a possibility that it could go toe-to-toe with Samsung and TSMC in terms of process node but it is likely to take years to catch up.
