Topic
Huawei Kirin 9030
Did China just beat Intel?
SemiAnalysis argues SMIC’s N+3 chip for Huawei is a real technical achievement: it reaches near-EUV-like density using DUV, but with much worse cost, complexity, yield, and efficiency. The episode’s bottom line is that China is not catching TSMC or Intel at the leading edge, but domestic chips may still be “good enough” for strategic workloads like phones, inference, and networking.
Ep. 019 - Inside the STEEL Lab: From Package to Transistor (Teardown Lab) | Afzal Ahmad, Andrew Wagner, Jordan Nanos
SemiAnalysis’s STEEL team explains how it tears down chips from package to transistor to infer process, architecture, and packaging details. The episode centers on SMIC’s N3 node and Huawei’s Kirin 9030, highlighting aggressive DUV scaling, SRAM shrink, NPU changes, and the growing challenge of analyzing backside power, gate-all-around, and advanced packaging.