HiSilicon was Huawei’s in-house chip team. It started as an ASIC group inside an equipment company and ended, briefly, as a top-ten global semiconductor designer. Each Kirin generation took a step into a smaller node and a richer feature set — until the foundry door closed in September 2020 and the lineage stopped on a chip called the 9000.
The Kirin 9000 was, by any external benchmark, a chip that belonged in 2020’s front rank. It carried 15.3 billion transistors, a 24-core Mali-G78, an integrated 5G modem, and three NPU cores. It was the first 5 nm phone SoC in the world to ship with 5G on-die.
It was also, by 7 December 2020, the last new chip Huawei would launch in any flagship phone for almost three years. The May 2020 amendment to the U.S. Foreign Direct Product Rule barred TSMC — and any foundry using American tools — from accepting Huawei orders. By mid-September TSMC’s last shipments had run. HiSilicon kept its design teams. The fabrication path stopped.
Huawei’s smartphone unit, briefly the world’s largest in Q2 2020 by units shipped, fell out of the global top five within a year.
On 29 August 2023, with no announcement, Huawei put the Mate 60 Pro on sale in mainland China. Inside it was the Kirin 9000S — fabricated by SMIC on a 7 nm-class process derived from DUV multipatterning, three years and two nodes behind where the 9000 had been. The chip was slower. It existed. The catch-up project that the 2020 cliff was supposed to halt had survived the cliff.