Huawei’s Latest Premium Phones Use South Korean Memory Chips

Huawei’s latest line of flagship Mate 70 smartphones continue to use memory chips from South Korea’s SK Hynix, a teardown has found.

Canadian research firm TechInsights said the Mate 70 Pro smartphone, introduced in November, uses SK Hynix’s 12 gigabyte low-power mobile DRAM and 512GB NAND chips.

The higher-end Mate 70 Pro Plus uses the same NAND and a SK Hynix 16GB DRAM chip, the firm said.

The mobile NAND chips were manufactured using a 14-nanometre production process and extreme ultraviolet lithography, an advanced process using equipment banned from sale in China but allowed in South Korea.

South Korean chips

SK Hynix said it “has been strictly complying with the relevant policies since the restrictions against Huawei were announced and has also suspended any transactions with the company since then”.

Huawei has been placed under various US-led export controls beginning in 2019.

The company’s ability to continue producing advanced smartphones is a sensitive point with US authorities, which have sought to cut off its supply of high-end parts such as processors, 5G chips and other semiconductors made using advanced manufacturing processes.

Huawei returned to the premium smartphone market last year with the Mate 60 range, which used a processor and 5G chip both locally produced by Shanghai-based SMIC using older equipment adapted for a 7nm process.

However, the company’s P and Mate series premium handsets continued to use DRAM and NAND chips from SK Hynix, TechInsights said.

This year Huawei began using DRAM from China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and NAND from domestic company Yangtze Memory Technologies Corporation (YMTC) in the Huawei Nova 13 Pro released in October, the analyst firm found.

‘Surprised’

TechInsights analysts said they were “surprised” to see SK Hynix chips in the Mate 70 range “as we expected Huawei to use memory devices from CXMT for DRAM and YMTC for NAND”.

SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology have been developing DRAM chips using a fifth-generation 10nm process, but 14nm remains the mainstream for DRAM due to its reliability and higher production yields, the analyst firm said.

The Mate 70 range uses Kirin 9010 and 9020 processors designed by Huawei’s HiSilicon unit and manufactured by SMIC using the same 7nm process as last year, TechInsights said.

The lack of major chip design improvements and removal of Android support in the new phones could limit their appeal, analysts have said.

The Mate 70 range is the first to use HarmonyOS Next, which breaks from the Android platform and requires apps to be adapted specifically to the platform.

Huawei has benefited from strong patriotic enthusiasm since last year to become one of the top sellers in mainland China, which is the world’s largest smartphone market.