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SemiAnalysis has published the first teardown from its new in-house lab , focusing on the minimum local metal pitch on SMIC’s third-gen 7nm at 32.5nm, tighter than the 36nm pitch shipping in Intel’s Panther Lake chips on 18A . The analysis was conducted on a HiSilicon Kirin 9030, the processor found inside Huawei’s Mate 80 phones and built on the N+3 process, which SemiAnalysis says trails Intel’s 18A high-density library by 38%. The SemiAnalysis Teardown Engineering & Evaluation Lab (STEEL) has been opened in Hillsboro, Oregon, and built to take on TechInsights in advanced-node reverse engineering.

A 36nm pitch is what Panther Lake ships with, but the 18A process on the whole supports a 32nm minimum metal pitch.…