Since SMIC is banned from obtaining an extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machine, the company has not been able to build a component using a process node more advanced than 7nm. However, a new report about Huawei’s Ascend 920 AI accelerator states that it was manufactured using SMIC’s 6nm node. Some analysts believe that SMIC was able to build the Ascend 920 for Huawei using a 6nm node by using older Deep Ultraviolet Lithography (DUV) technology and a technique known as multi-patterning.
With the latter technique, smaller patterns can be printed on a silicon wafer by using precise alignment to print a circuitry pattern multiple times. Additionally, SMIC’s N+3 process is believed to be equivalent to 6nm. Even without the use of an EUV machine, it is possible that SMIC was able to use a 6nm process node for the Ascend 920 AI accelerator.
Huawei’s Ascend 920 competes with Nvidia’s H20 and is said to support a speed of 900 TFLOPS. The acronym stands for Trillions of Floating-Point Operations Per Second and the Ascend 920’s speed of 900 TFLOPS is reportedly 30% to 40% faster than Huawei’s previous AI accelerator, the 7nm Ascend 910C. The Ascend 920 also has a memory bandwidth of 4 TB/s which tops the Ascend 910C’s bandwidth of 3.2 TB/s.
Ironically, the U.S. can be credited with helping Huawei grab a huge share of its domestic AI accelerator market. That’s because the U.S. requires that a special license be obtained by Chinese companies importing the Nvidia H20 chip into China. Because these licenses are hard to get, much of the business that Nvidia might have received is going to Huawei since no special license is needed for domestic firms in China to buy Ascend AI accelerators.
The very tool that the U.S. has wielded in an effort to hurt Huawei, sanctions, has actually helped the company grow its AI business while slowing down Nvidia’s AI revenue in China.
