Huawei is reportedly all out of its homegrown chips but a new patent could be a gamechanger

Back in May 2019, Huawei was placed on the U.S. entity list which it still is on today. The U.S. cited security as the reason why it put the company on the list which prevents it from accessing its U.S. supply chain, including Google. Exactly one year later, the U.S. changed its export rules preventing foundries using American technology to produce chips from sending cutting-edge silicon to Huawei. 

A new report says that Huawei has used every single last homegrown Kirin chip

In October, The Financial Times reported that Huawei is looking to redesign its phones to work with less advanced chips produced by Chinese foundries. China’s largest foundry is SMIC and while it was able to produce chips using its 7nm process node, those chips were for cryptocurrency mining and not complex enough to drive a smartphone. SMIC and other Chinese foundries are producing 14nm chips at best, far from the cutting-edge 3nm chips that TSMC and Samsung Foundry are shipping next year.

Huawei has done an amazing job designing its own HarmonyOS operating system (now on its third version) and it replaced the Google Mobile Services ecosystem with its own Huawei Mobile Services. But since Huawei won’t be able to find a foundry able to produce cutting-edge chips without using U.S. technology, the export rule change is Huawei’s biggest issue at this point.

Huawei’s EUV patent could be a gamechanger

And the U.S. has also worked with the Netherlands to prevent the export to China of important Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUV) machines. Mostly made by a Dutch company called ASML, these are school bus-sized machines that cost $150 million each and are used to etch circuitry patterns thinner than a human hair on silicon wafers. These patterns have to be extremely thin so that billions of transistors can be placed inside a chip.