After Huawei surprised everyone by producing a 7nm 5G chipset, some House Republicans want tighter sanctions against the company.
Republicans in the House are seeking to tighten U.S. restrictions on Huawei after the latter introduced its latest flagship phone, the Mate 60 Pro, using 5G chipsets manufactured by China’s largest foundry, SMIC, using its 7nm process node. Back in 2019 and 2020, the U.S. restricted Huawei from accessing its U.S. supply chain, including Google, and prevented foundries using American technology from shipping 5G chips to the company.2020’s Mate 40 line was the last to use Huawei’s homegrown Kirin 5G chips
The last time Huawei was able to ship a flagship phone that contained its own 5G chip was in 2020 with the Mate 40 line. Since then, it has used the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 SoC from Qualcomm that were tweaked to prevent them from working with 5G signals. The GOP senators in the House are looking to place full restrictions on Huawei by stating that the company used American technology to get the Kirin 9000S 5G chipsets that are used on the Mate 60 Pro. 10 Republican representatives wrote a letter to Alan Estevez, the undersecretary for industry and security at the Commerce Department, stating that the introduction of Huawei’s new phone shows that existing restrictions against Huawei are not effective.
