Rumor: Huawei will let TSMC produce Kirin 980-soc at 7nm

TSMC would produce the upcoming Kirin 980 soc of Huawei division HiSilicon at 7nm and that soc would appear in a smartphone in the fall. That is what the Taiwanese Digitimes claims. So far there are no socs for smartphones produced at 7nm.

Huawei probably wants to equip its upcoming successor to the Mate 10 series with the Kirin 980; in recent years, the Chinese manufacturer invariably put its latest soc first in the Mate smartphones. The first Huawei smartphone with 7nm-soc should appear this year, Digitimes reports.

Cambricon, the company that designed the Kirin 970’s neural processing unit, recently unveiled the MLU100, an artificial intelligence chip made by TSMC on its 7nm FinFet process. There is a chance that Huawei and Cambricon will team up again for the Kirin 980.

Digitimes further reports that TSMC’s competitor Samsung also wants to produce HiSilicon’s socs. Huawei uses Kirin-socs in many of its models and the Chinese manufacturer has been the global number three in the smartphone market for a few years, after Samsung and Apple.

Samsung and TSMC produce current socs in high-end smartphones, such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, Apple A11 Bionic, Samsung Exynos 9810 and Huawei Kirin 970, all at 10nm. Huawei has released its Mate smartphones in the fall in recent years.