With rumors flying about Huawei using a 5nm chipset, the Kirin 9100, for the Mate 70 series, U.S. lawmakers are getting concerned.
Huawei will be introducing its second flagship line of the year late in the fourth quarter. The manufacturer has long released two flagship series each year with the photography-based P-series (now known as the Pura line) typically seen in Q1, and the innovative Mate series hitting the marketplace in Q4. After stunning the smartphone world last year by packing the Mate 60 line with its first homegrown 5G supporting Kirin chip in three years (the Mate 40 line was the last Huawei phone powered by a 5G Kirin chip), U.S. lawmakers threw a fit.
After all, the U.S. Commerce Department changed U.S. export rules in 2020 to prevent foundries using American technology to manufacture chips from shipping any cutting-edge (read 5G) chips to Huawei. As a result, the P50, Mate 50, and P60 flagship lines used Snapdragon chips that Qualcomm was able to ship to Huawei thanks to a license obtained from the Commerce Department. But these chips were tweaked so that they couldn’t support 5G.
