Huawei was prevented from purchasing ASML's new UEV machines because they contained US-made technology. Because of this obstacle, Huawei's new chip development has been stalled for the past six years and only after they developed their own technology did they get back on track.
At the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) 2026 in Shanghai today, Huawei announced its Tau Scaling Law Ï„ approach, which it says will produce chips on par with 1.4nm technology using its own expertise.
Tau Scaling Law is a chip design approach that focuses on reducing signal and data travel times rather than shrinking transistor sizes like current methods. Huawei aims to produce chips with a transistor density equivalent to the 1.4 nm process by 2031. This still puts Huawei behind TSMC, which is targeting the production of its first 1.4nm chips in 2028, and Samsung and Intel starting in 2029.
Huawei has built a layered optimization ecosystem to reduce Ï„ at all levels. At the device level, Huawei optimizes transistor resistance, interconnect, and capacitance to minimize Ï„. At the circuit level, they introduce Logic Folding, which folds logic to shorten critical paths, reduce R time lags, and increase transistor density.
Next, at the chip level, software-architecture-chips to control the flow of instructions and data in a granular manner are developed to increase parallelism and reduce end-to-end latency. Finally, at the system level, Lingqu Bus is introduced to consolidate memory addresses and reduce system communication latency.
Huawei says it has designed and produced 381 chips in the past six years using the Tau Scaling Law principle. These chips are used in their smartphones and artificial intelligence (AI) computing equipment.
Also announced is that the Kirin chips to be introduced in the fall will use the Logic Folding architecture, which shortens internal wiring to improve performance. Since the Kirin 9000s chip was re-produced in 2023, it is still just reusing 2020 technology due to the constraints of the DUV machine used.
In terms of performance, the Kirin chip also does not offer the power of flagship chips from Qualcomm, MediaTek and Samsung. But if the Logic Folding technology works as claimed, Huawei will finally return to offering truly powerful flagship devices like during the Huawei P30 Pro era.
