Huawei Had Completed Tape-Out Of The Kirin 9000S Back In 2021, Latest Rumor Claims That It Launched Several Years After Due To Trade Sanctions
The Kirin 9000S will go down in history as the chipset that caused Huawei’s resurgence, and while it fails to provide any competition to its current-generation competitors in performance or power efficiency, its existence signifies what the company achieved when its back was against the wall as a result of the U.S. trade ban. One tipster now reveals that the chipset had reached tape-out status back in 2021, which meant that mass production of the silicon should not have been far off. Unfortunately, Huawei was met with a ton of obstacles in its path thanks to the trade sanctions from the U.S., resulting in the Kirin 9000S delay.
SMIC, Huawei’s only semiconductor foundry, may have also found it difficult to improve its 7nm yields for the Kirin 9000S, leading to further delay
Before the Kirin 9000S was used in the Mate 60 series that was introduced in August last year, Huawei relied on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 for the P60 family. Given that the U.S. introduced a trade ban on the former Chinese giant back in 2019, Huawei had plans to mount a comeback early in 2021, but @jasonwill101 points out on X that it was challenging to materialize such goals. For one thing, just because a chipset has reached the tape-out stage does not mean it has successfully entered the production phase, and that was a formidable obstacle to scale.
Since TSMC and Samsung were barred from accepting Kirin 9000S orders from Huawei, it was up to SMIC, China’s largest semiconductor manufacturer, to do its bidding. Unfortunately, successfully mass producing the Kirin 9000S at an acceptable cost was a Herculean task, especially when SMIC suffered from poor 7nm yields. In the end, both entities successfully managed to churn out the first Kirin 9000S shipments, which powered the Mate 60 models’ innards.
The SoC’s existence caused a firestorm of backlash from U.S. lawmakers, with Representative Michael McCaul believing that Huawei violated sanctions with this launch. While there was a sense of
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