Huawei Technologies said on May 25 it has found a new way to design chips to bring its semiconductor capabilities close to those of global chipmakers Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Intel, as China’s tech champion continues working to overcome US sanctions that have cut it off from top-tier global suppliers.
Huawei said that over the past six years, it has developed a new principle, known as the Tau scaling law, to break through the limits of Moore’s Law and keep pursuing advanced semiconductor manufacturing technologies, He Tingbo, Huawei’s semiconductor chief, said at the 2026 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, or ISCAS, in Shanghai.
The Tau scaling law is also called “Her’s law” by Huawei, in recognition of He, who joined the company in 1996 and has been leading Huawei’s efforts to develop alternative ways to design chips amid Washington’s persistent crackdown. As president of its semiconductor business department, she has overseen the transformation of chip arm HiSilicon Technologies from a small design team into a globally recognized designer of chips for smartphones, PCs, artificial intelligence computing, and more.
Based on this new principle, He said, engineers can reduce signal delay and steadily improve transistor density to keep advancing chip computing power beyond the limits of Moore’s law, which relies on shrinking transistors ever smaller to increase computing power.
Speaking at the conference, He described how Her’s law led to the development of Huawei’s new LogicFolding chip architecture, which sharply increases chip performance. She cited the Kirin system-on-chip chipset for phones, due out later this year, as an example, saying it delivers a 55% increase in transistor density and a 41% power-efficiency compared with traditional designs.
These gains were “obtained not through a new lithography step but through a topological reorganization of the spatial distribution of logic in three dimensions,” according to He.
Huawei believes its new approach to chip development will become an industry standard. “Six years ago, the geometric roadmap [based on Moore’s law] plateaued, forcing a more fundamental question—one that, in retrospect, the entire industry will eventually have to confront,” the company said in a paper released on May 25.
Huawei’s Kirin chipset line will be the first to fully adopt the new law, and will be used in its flagship smartphone to be released this year. Huawei said it will use the law to improve the computing performance of its other AI chip products as well.
Before the US hit Huawei with strict export controls to block its use of advanced foreign technologies, the Chinese tech giant briefly became the world’s second largest smartphone maker by shipments, surpassing Apple and trailing only Samsung. Huawei’s smartphone business was hit particularly hard by the US crackdown. Whether the revamped Kirin chipset can meaningfully revive the company’s handset business remains to be seen.
Huawei said that with the latest chip design approach, it could match the 1.4-nanometer, also known as 14 angstrom, chip technologies of global chip leaders by 2031. This timeline would put the company just a few years behind TSMC and Intel, which are each planning for their own 1.4-nm chip production to start around 2028 and 2029.
Generally, the smaller the nanometer size, the more advanced the chips. However, it has become extremely challenging to pack more transistors into the same size of chip area and the semiconductor sector is exploring ways to go beyond Moore’s law.
While the upcoming Kirin chips are the first to fully adopt Her’s law, Huawei said it has already designed the new approach to varying degrees in designing 381 types of chips across consumer electronics, networking, and computing products over the past six years.
He said the company looks forward to working closely with scientists, engineers and industry partners around the world on the new law to keep driving the advancement of the chip and electronics industries.
“No single company can independently find all the answers along the path of semiconductor evolution,” she said.
With the chip industry as a whole wrestling with the slowing of Moore’s law, global chipmakers are stepping up efforts to expand and develop new chip packaging technologies by connecting and stacking different chips together to boost computing performance. AI chip leaders such as Nvidia, Google, and Amazon are exploring advanced packaging methods to more tightly connect and integrate GPUs (graphics processing units), CPUs (central processing units), and memory chips for faster and more efficient computing.
Huawei’s announcement comes as Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, which is Huawei’s biggest rival in AI computing, recently said his company has basically conceded the Chinese market to Huawei amid the US export controls on AI chips to the country. AMD’s CEO Lisa Su also acknowledged that her company’s high-end AI chipset is unlikely to see meaningful sales in China.
This article first appeared on Nikkei Asia. It has been republished here as part of 36Kr’s ongoing partnership with Nikkei.