Text/Zhang Tiankan
(Author: Zhang Tiankan, special commentator, scholar, media personality; This article is an exclusive commissioned article by Litchi News Client and Litchi.com, please indicate the source for reprinting. ）
Huawei's latest mobile phone has attracted global attention.
Recently, many professional institutions and technology bloggers at home and abroad have disassembled Huawei's new mobile phone Mate60 Pro, especially paying attention to the new Kirin 9000s chip equipped with the mobile phone. On September 5, TechInsights, a world-renowned semiconductor industry observation organization, publicly released their teardown report on Huawei Mate 60 Pro. The vice chairman of TechInsights used words such as "amazing" and "unexpected" when evaluating Huawei Mate60 Pro, but also analyzed that the chip Kirin 9000S equipped with Huawei Mate 60 Pro is still 2-2.5 nodes away from the most advanced technology.
The nanometer level is an important measure of whether an electronic product is sophisticated and powerful. The smaller the transistor density and the greater the number of transistors that can fit per unit area of the template, the more powerful the chip and the more versatile. The transistors in Huawei's mobile phone chips have reached or approached 7 nanometers, which is an extraordinary achievement.
There are quite a few people cheering and sighing, China's mobile phone has finally broken through the "stuck neck" state, and in the future, other electronic products and intelligent tools are also likely to achieve breakthroughs.
The rapid development of Huawei's mobile phone technology can be recognized internationally by professionals, and it is a breakthrough that was not expected internationally and could not be imagined by the Chinese people. Lu Tingjie, a professor at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and executive vice president of the China Information Economics Association, said, "This time we have completed the progress of 0 to 1, and we have finally solved the problem of advanced 5G chips for 5G smartphones."
Progress from 0 to 1 is innovation from scratch. According to Peter Thiel's book From 0 to 1, 0 to 1 has a double meaning, one is entrepreneurship from 0 to 1, and the other is innovation from 0 to 1. Thiel values the latter more, that is, innovation from 0 to 1. If there is no innovation from 0 to 1, there is no talk of entrepreneurship from 0 to 1. Of course, in practice, researchers, entrepreneurs and economists also add a connotation from 0 to 1, that is, from 1 to N.
Obviously, the Huawei mobile phone interpreted by experts from 0 to 1 refers to innovation from 0 to 1, and there will be innovation from 1 to N in the future. However, the expert's interpretation is also cautious, and it must be admitted that Huawei mobile phones are still far from the most advanced technology in the world. The upcoming iPhone 15 series has actually used 4nm chips, and the current Huawei Kirin 9000S chip should reach or approach 7nm technology. Moving from 7nm to 5nm to 4nm also requires a long and difficult research and development process.
This judgment is also interpreted from the results of the analysis by the vice chairman of TechInsights. TechInsights, vice chairman, believes that the chip equipped with Huawei Mate 60 Pro is still 2-2.5 nodes away from the most advanced technology, and this gap is still 3 to 5 years away from the advanced process of 5G chips, and these 3 to 5 years are judged by Western countries with their technological progress.
If you look a little deeper, China's existing technology is not only 7 nanometers to 5 nanometers distance, there are other factors.
First, it can be seen in the real world of technology. The so-called nanometer of the chip has different standards in different enterprises and companies, although they are called 14 nm or 7 nm transistors, but the density of transistors per unit volume is not the same. Taking TSMC, Samsung and Intel as an example, the same 14nm process, the transistor density of each family is different, among which, Intel's transistor density in each process node is the highest.
From this perspective, TechInsights said that the chip Kirin 9000S of Huawei mobile phones is close to or reaches a fine level of 7 nanometers, where it remains to be seen whether it can accommodate as many transistors as Intel does in the real technology world, and the functionality remains to be tested and trialed. Since there is no universal standard, just comparing the same 14 nm or 7 nm numbers, you can't see the real technical content, the simplest is to compare the density of transistors.
In the past, integrated circuit manufacturing processes, also known as technology nodes, used deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography to reduce the size of transistors from hundreds of nanometers to 20 nanometers. Today's most advanced ASML companies use state-of-the-art extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography processes to produce 5-nanometer transistors, which can greatly increase the density of transistors in semiconductor chips and produce more efficient integrated circuits at a lower cost.
However, the use of extreme ultraviolet lithography also requires stacking technology, and it is not simply stacking two 14-nanometer chips to 7-nanometer chips. Previously, China has basically realized the localization of 14 nm chips, but to advance to 7 nm, or even more integrated chips, this is not a linear problem, will produce more and more complex problems, of which energy consumption and heat generation are the first to overcome.
Coupled with design software, lamination, lithography machine and other technologies, if there is no supporting technology, the function and cost problems will be highlighted, such as high power consumption, will heat and crash, if the cost is as high as one or two thousand yuan, or can not have a large market share.
The international recognition that Huawei has made a breakthrough in technology and that it is an unexpected improvement for them is an achievement. Technology applications such as mobile computing, artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, and high-performance computing with next-generation 5G connectivity build on the higher performance and energy efficiency that next-generation innovative CPU chips can provide. We need to face up to the gap between the real world of technology at home and abroad. We expect that Chinese enterprises and scientific research institutions will produce more innovative products from 0 to 1 and innovative products from 1 to N, so as to provide people with better living and production tools, and establish and form an independent industrial technology system.