Huawei Technologies of China anticipates creating high-end chips by 2031 featuring transistor density comparable to 1.4-nanometre processes, despite US sanctions complicating China's ability to manufacture the most advanced chips globally.
The forecast, released by Huawei, was the most notable assertion regarding what the company refers to as the Tau Scaling Law, a novel principle for enhancing chips since the industry can no longer depend primarily on reducing transistor sizes.
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He Tingbo, president of Huawei's semiconductor division and director of its Scientist Committee, unveiled the new concept during a keynote speech called "New Semiconductor Path in Practice" at the 2026 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) in Shanghai, according to the company.
China is generally perceived as improbable to achieve that level solely through traditional manufacturing, as Washington has limited its access to advanced lithography equipment and other essential semiconductor technologies.
Huawei stated that the Tau Scaling Law aims to reduce the time required for signals and data to traverse chips and computing systems. If it succeeds, it might provide the company with a means to enhance performance and increase chip density, even with limitations on China's access to the most cutting-edge semiconductor machinery.
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Huawei announced that its Kirin processors set to debut in the fall of 2026 would be the first to implement a related architecture known as LogicFolding, which the company claimed would reduce internal wiring in chips and greatly enhance performance.
The company reported that it had developed and manufactured 381 chips in the last six years according to the Tau Scaling Law, catering to sectors such as smartphones and artificial intelligence computing.
The announcement highlighted Huawei’s extensive efforts to create a completely autonomous chip innovation system, as it aimed to circumvent severe US export limitations and manage the intricate technical challenges of the post-Moore’s Law period.
The worldwide semiconductor sector has depended on Moore’s Law – the insight that the number of transistors on a microchip doubled approximately every two years – to propel exponential increases in computing power for years, yet as transistor dimensions near physical and atomic boundaries, this conventional scaling path has significantly diminished.
It also represented a unique opportunity for He, who has been spearheading Huawei’s semiconductor unit growth for twenty years while staying under the radar, to openly give a keynote address and announce the firm’s advancements in chip innovation.
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In a further indication of Huawei’s chip division gaining visibility, the company’s relatively obscure chip research lab – the Chip Fundamental Technology Research Laboratory – was showcased on national television for the initial time earlier this month, as Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei welcomed Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang at the firm’s Lianqiu Lake campus in Shanghai.
Huawei has strongly intensified its focus on its own Ascend AI chips and Kunpeng processors in recent years, aiming to address the domestic computing gap created by foreign tech chip leaders like Nvidia.
To achieve its goal of taking over Nvidia’s position in China’s AI training and inference tasks, the company plans to introduce its Ascend 950 series, which comprises the 950PR and 950DT, in 2026, followed by the Ascend 960 and Ascend 970 in 2027 and 2028, respectively, aligning its schedule with the AI chips from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.