Mystery surrounding TSMC chips in Huawei accelerators

Despite an export ban, chips manufactured by global market leader TSMC are said to have ended up in AI accelerators from Huawei. In the meantime, a name has emerged that is said to have made the assembly possible: the Chinese company Sophgo.

According to reports from Reuters and The Information, Sophgo is said to have ordered the chips from TSMC and then passed them on to Huawei. The information is said to come from manufacturer and government circles. TSMC has since stopped all deliveries.

Sophgo contradicts the reportsin a statement: "Sophgo has submitted a detailed investigation report to TSMC to prove that Sophgo has nothing to do with the Huawei investigation."

Sophgo specializes in AI chips for application-specific tasks, such as video analysis. The company is increasingly relying on the open instruction set RISC-V, both for controlling the AI units and for general processors. Sophgo apparently also has links to crypto miner manufacturer Bitmain: Bitmain boss Micree Zhan is said to have co-founded Sophgo.

Any involvement with Huawei would come as a surprise, as Bitmain in particular is dependent on TSMC's modern manufacturing processes and is unlikely to be able to forfeit its cooperation. The export restrictions imposed by the USA do not affect China in general, but specific companies on the so-called Entity List. Huawei is also listed there – due to accusations that Huawei also supplies the Chinese military.

N7HPC chips from TSMC + copied packaging technology

The ball was set rolling by analysts from the renowned company Techinsights, who honed in on Huawei's AI accelerator Ascend 910B and examined its structures. It consists of a main chiplet with the AI computing units, several HBM memory modules and a silicon interposer.

Techinsights was able to clearly assign the main chiplet to TSMC's 7-nanometer process N7HPC – an N7 offshoot designed for high clock frequencies. The packaging technology is said to be strongly based on TSMC's chip-on-wafer-on-substrate with silicon interposer (CoWoS-S) and clearly distinguishable from Samsung's and Intel's packaging processes, among other things due to epoxy casting. The analysts suspect a Chinese CoWoS-S copy. In China, for example, the company JCET specializes in packaging.

TSMC is said to have launched an investigation after the discovery and reported the results to the US authorities.

TSMC and Huawei both published statements stating that they are complying with US regulations and will no longer work together. Huawei also insists that it never presented the Ascend 910B. Unofficially, however, Chinese hyperscalers such as Baidu are said to have received it since 2022. Huawei is reportedly planning to unveil the new Ascend 910C variant soon. TSMC manufactured the original Ascend 910 until the export restrictions came into force in 2020.

(mma)