Huawei has ambitious plans to restart the manufacturing of high-end mobile system-on-chips as early as this year, a report by Nikkei claims. The story corroborates an earlier Reuters report that Huawei plans to use SMIC's 7nm-class fabrication technology to make its comeback to smartphone SoCs. But there is a problem that Huawei may reportedly face: high defect density of SMIC's 7nm-class node.
"However, the production yield [quality] for a 7nm node is believed to be quite low, at about 50%, and it still has lots of room for improvement," said Donnie Teng, an analyst with Nomura Securities, in a comment to Nikkei. "The chip being available and the chip being commercially ready are different things. It is still worth monitoring how it goes, but we understand Huawei is willing to invest a lot on this to bring back its chips."
