Samsung Electronics denies business ties with Huawei

Samsung Electronics has made its case that it never traded with Huawei after the 2020 U.S. sanctions, following the report that some of its chips are in the phones sold by the Chinese manufacturer.

Despite U.S. sanctions, Huawei has been equipping its latest smartphone and tablet devices with foreign-made chips. [REUTERS/YONHAP]

Samsung Electronics has made its case that it never traded with Huawei after the 2020 U.S. sanctions, following the report that some of its chips are in the phones sold by the Chinese manufacturer.

"Samsung has been abiding by export regulations set forth by the U.S. government and does not hold business relationships outlined within the guardrails," a spokesperson at Samsung Electronics said.

Huawei, however, has managed to use memory chips made by Samsung, Kioxia and even Micron as well as SK hynix despite U.S. sanctions on the Chinese tech company in 2020, according to Taiwan's DigiTimes.

With SK hynix’s 512-gigabyte NAND flagship chips found in a teardown of Huawei’s latest Mate 60 Pro smartphone, questions on the efficacy of memory chip sanctions were raised.

Huawei has deployed DRAM chips from Samsung and Micron and NAND Flash chips by Kioxia in its smartphone and tablet products over the past three years.

This is to say that China had either stockpiled enough supply to last these years or found a hidden channel to keep bringing in foreign-made semiconductors.

SK hynix said earlier this month that it stopped supplying its products to Huawei in 2020 after the U.S. government, citing security issues, banned companies from supplying chips made with U.S. equipment and technology to Huawei without approval.

“SK hynix doesn’t do business with Huawei,” an SK hynix spokesperson told the Korea JoongAng Daily then.

SK hynix earlier this month said it has not supplied chips to Huawei since U.S. chip sanctions began in 2020. [YONHAP]

“It is our firm policy to abide by the U.S. export regulation.”

DigiTimes added that the latest Huawei products contained U.S., Japan and Korea-made chips but not homemade chips made by Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) and ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT).

“Unlike the mobile application processors that function as a brain for smartphones, memory chips are more like a notebook [that does not contain key data related to security],” a source from the semiconductor industry said.

“It is difficult to control the supply chain entirely and is a stretch to say that it [memory chip flow] falls in the realm of security unless it involves manufacturing technology.”

The chip industry suspects Huawei does in fact have a rich stockpile of memory chips purchased before the August 2020 ban, equipping its products released in 2021 and 2022 with this storage.

Recent findings of sneaked foreign-made chips in Huawei products also hint that YMTC and CXMT chips are underperforming the LPDDR5 DRAM chips in the latest Huawei smartphones.

CXMT is reportedly aiming to develop high-bandwidth memory but is still stuck at the level of 20-nanometer fabrication.

Samsung Electronics' LPDDR5X DRAM chip [SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS]

Samsung Electronics in November 2021 managed to produce 14-nanometer LPDDR5X mobile DRAM chips using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) technology.

But China is yet to back down on its chip ambitions, according to a South China Morning Post report that said researchers from Tsinghua University have begun developing its own microchip production method dubbed steady-state microbunching (SSMB).

Researchers are trying to “lay the foundation for the future of semiconductor fabrication” using particle accelerators to create a novel laser source, ultimately “exploring new avenues to bypass restrictions on lithography machines,” South China Morning Post reported Monday.

EUV technology, used in producing advanced microchips under 7 nanometers, is exclusively owned by Dutch chip equipment producer ASML. ASML joined U.S. sanctions from an early stage and stopped exporting EUV lithography machines to China.

“There is still a long way to go before our independent development of EUV lithography machines, but SSMB-based EUV light sources give us an alternative to the sanctioned technology,” Tang Chuanxing, the lead professor of the project, said in a Tsinghua University report.

The SSMB project began in 2017 but recently became publicly known due to Huawei’s “breakthrough.”

The new technology can catapult China as a new leader in advanced semiconductor manufacturing, Tsinghua researchers added.

BY LEE HEE-KWON,PARK EUN-JEE AND SOHN DONG-JOO [sohn.dongjoo@joongang.co.kr]