SemiAnalysis has put SMIC's third-generation 7nm process under the microscope — and the numbers are more complicated than either side would like.
The research firm's new in-house teardown lab chose Huawei's HiSilicon Kirin 9030 as its first subject. The chip, produced by China's SMIC under US export controls that were meant to prevent exactly this kind of progress, recorded a minimum local metal pitch of 32.5nm. That figure undercuts Intel's 18A process on the same metric. Density, however, is a different story: SMIC's node trails by 38% compared to the leading Western and Taiwanese alternatives SemiAnalysis benchmarked against.
The gap matters because density — how many transistors you can pack into a given area — is what ultimately drives performance-per-watt and die-cost economics. A tighter metal pitch is one input to density, but it is not the whole equation. SMIC closing that gap at all, while operating under sweeping US sanctions on advanced chipmaking equipment, is a signal that containment policy is leaking.
China's semiconductor push has long been described as years behind TSMC and Samsung. The Kirin 9030 teardown suggests the distance is real but shrinking, and that sanctions have slowed rather than stopped the climb. The 38% density lag is meaningful; so is the fact that a sanctioned fab is now trading punches with Intel on any metric at all.