Huawei unveils “Tau Scaling Law” to chase 1.4nm-class chips without EUV

Huawei unveiled a new chip design theory in Shanghai on Monday, stating it can keep pace with the world’s most advanced semiconductors even while locked out of the specialized machinery required to manufacture them. Huawei’s Kirin chips are making a global comeback, though not a complete one. The Mate 60 series, equipped with its in-house Kirin chipset, had a successful launch in China in 2023, but ongoing U.S. restrictions are holding back a full global release.

The Chinese tech company calls this approach the “Tau Scaling Law”. Instead of chasing ever‑smaller transistors, the core idea is to make data move faster inside the chip itself. Huawei says that by rethinking how logic blocks are wired together, it could eventually achieve transistor density comparable to 1.4‑nanometre chips by 2031.

This concept is built into a new architecture Huawei has named “LogicFolding”. The company describes it as a method to shorten internal wiring and reduce the delays that slow processors down when moving data around. Huawei confirmed the first Kirin mobile chips using LogicFolding technology will launch later this year.

The announcement comes as Huawei remains under U.S. export controls first imposed in 2019. These rules cut the company off from American chip‑design software and, crucially, from extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems made by ASML in the Netherlands, the essential tool every leading chipmaker uses to produce chips below the 7‑nanometre node.

The company has responded by pouring resources into its in‑house chip design arm HiSilicon and leaning on domestic manufacturing capabilities. It surprised the global industry in 2023 with the Mate 60 Pro, powered by a 7‑nanometre Kirin chip produced in China by SMIC, despite the sanctions.

According to Reuters, the company has already produced hundreds of test chips using principles from the Tau framework. The company is also expanding aggressively into artificial intelligence silicon, where its Ascend processors are positioned as homegrown alternatives to Nvidia’s GPUs within China.

As shrinking transistors becomes increasingly expensive across the entire industry, all chipmakers are turning to architectural improvements to boost performance. For Huawei, however, this shift is far more urgent, since it cannot access the world’s most advanced lithography tools. The Shanghai presentation was less of a product launch, and more a clear signal that China intends to close the technology gap, by changing the rules of the race.