According to foreign media reports, the Chinese company Huawei Technologies is going through difficult times, since the scandal with the disclosure of supply channels for 7-nm chips for its needs has only aggravated the situation with sanctions. However, a new round of increased sanctions will not prevent Huawei from launching mass production and starting to supply its customers with the latest Ascend 910C computing accelerators from the next quarter, Reuters claims.
Image source: Huawei Technologies
It is expected that SMIC will continue to produce Ascend 910C chips using its N + 2 technology, but the yield level for this product range will not exceed 20%. This means that out of five released chips, only one will be suitable for further use for its intended purpose. Of course, this situation with the level of defects will have a purely negative impact on the utilization of SMIC equipment and the costs of the customer represented by Huawei.
While in the production of such complex semiconductor components, a yield level of about 70% is considered acceptable from an economic point of view, even the already “tested” Ascend 910B cannot boast of an indicator of more than 50%. In such conditions, Huawei customers lose the opportunity to receive computing accelerators of this brand in the desired quantities. For example, the company that created TikTok, ByteDance, ordered more than 100,000 Ascend 910B accelerators from Huawei this year, but by July received only 30,000 of them.
Other Huawei customers suffer from similar problems, and the company is forced to give priority to meeting the needs of government customers or large private companies. Without EUV equipment, the supply of which to China has been completely prohibited due to sanctions since 2019, SMIC is extremely difficult to produce 7nm chips at an acceptable cost. It is possible that Donald Trump’s return to the White House will require Chinese companies to become even more creative in circumventing sanctions.