Research company executives said that Kirin 9000S uses a 14nm process and SMIC uses technical means to make its performance closer to 7nm.

The Kirin 9000S, which first appeared on Huawei Mate60Pro, sparked controversy on various platforms and also shocked the US government. Earlier reports stated that Chinese semiconductor manufacturer SMIC used its 7nm technology to mass-produce its latest SoC. However, the CEO of a research company believes that only special technology can make the latest chipset perform as well as the 7nm chipset, but it is actually made on the older and inferior 14nm process.

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Industry experts praised the Kirin 9000S-powered Mate 60 Pro because Huawei was able to mass-produce chips despite U.S. trade sanctions. While some research firms believe the latest chips are 7nm components produced by SMIC, the South China Morning Post spoke to Minatake Mitchell Kashio, CEO of research firm Fomalhauto TechnoSolutions, via email. He believes that it is obvious that Kirin 9000S is not a real 7nm SoC, but a 14nm SoC.

Minatake Mitchell Kashio, CEO of Fomalhaut TechnoSolutions, a Tokyo-based electronics research company, told the South China Morning Post in an email interview that based on their own phone teardowns, he believes the Kirin 9000 SCPU is manufactured using SMIC's 14nm process. He said that in order to make the chip performance closer to that of a 7-nanometer processor, some special technologies have been added to the manufacturing process.

Some benchmark tests also show that Kirin 9000S achieves similar performance to 7-nanometer chips, and SMIC is also using DUV (deep ultraviolet) equipment to manufacture chips under this photolithography process. Unfortunately, due to U.S. sanctions, Chinese companies are unable to purchase advanced EUV equipment from ASML in the Netherlands and therefore may not be able to break the 7-nanometer ceiling.

Producing 7-nanometer chips also directly violates U.S. sanctions, as U.S. export controls are designed to limit China's chip production to 14-nanometer, a decade behind the latest technology. A report points out that with the advent of Kirin 9000S, China is now about four years behind the United States, greatly narrowing the technology gap.

But the view given by the research company executives is only one side of the story. There is currently no conclusive evidence that the new SoC is manufactured using the 14nm process, so we can only wait for more updates to provide specific information.