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Chinese Fab SMIC's 7Nm Metal Pitch Beats Intel 18A but Lags 38% on Density, Teardown Finds
EDITORS: THIS HAS BEEN PRODUCED BY SOFTWARE UNDER DEVELOPMENT - THE CONTENT MAY REQUIRE EXTENSIVE EDITING
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/semianalysis-opens-its-own-chip-teardown-lab [tomshardware.com]
A 36nm pitch is what Panther Lake ships with, but the 18A process on the whole supports a 32nm minimum metal pitch. With Panter Lake, Intel opted to relax the pitch because routing power through the back of the wafer — via PowerVia — clears the front-side metal stack for signal wiring.
Each of those workarounds obviously adds complexity and cost, with N+3’s ceiling ultimately showing a huge trade-off. The Kirin 9030 Pro's [tomshardware.com] prime core runs at 2.75 GHz and lands near Arm's 2021-era Cortex-X2 per clock, leaving the chip roughly level with Android flagships from three years ago and behind current parts from Apple, Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Samsung. Huawei’s roadmap does say that it’s targeting 5 GHz by 2031, but, as SemiAnalysis notes, that’s “far beyond what planar scaling alone could deliver.”
The company is taking aim at the Ottawa-based TechInsights, which is backed by private equity and held by the likes of Oakley Capital and CVC Growth. SemiAnalysis claims its rival is up for sale and has underinvested in equipment as a result, though that hasn’t been officially confirmed. The teardown also found the Kirin 9030 Pro carrying Samsung LPDDR5X memory, with 16 GB variants turning up DRAM from Chinese maker CXMT as well.
