Huawei's chip law looks less like Moore and more like marketing

Summary

Systems Huawei's chip law looks less like Moore and more like marketing Chinese tech biz shows off clever workaround for its process node gap, but it isn't catching up with Intel and TSMC Huawei is touting a semiconductor advance - including something it calls the "Tau Scaling Law" as a successor to Moore's Law - but at least one chip expert says the news is more branding than breakthrough.The Chinese tech titan unveiled its advances at the 2026 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) in Shanghai during a speech titled "New Semiconductor Path in Practice" by He Tingbo, president of its semiconductor business.He, who is a she, said Moore's Law has seen diminishing returns, and instead presented the Tau Scaling Law as "a new principle for guiding the future development of the semiconductor industry." Tau Scaling, according to He, is about "a shift from geometric to time scaling as the new guiding principle for electronic system evolution." She said that, at the device level, this is about signal propagation time, which is linked to interconnect RC (resistance and capacitance) parasitics, pipeline length, and circuit depth. In other words, it is about optimizing the resistance and parasitic capacitance of transistors and interconnects to cut signal delays, which every chip company puts a lot of effort into anyway.As an example of how Tau Scaling works, He said LogicFolding is one solution Huawei has devised - set to feature in its Kirin 2026 system-on-chip, the latest version of its silicon for smartphones, later this year."It is built on a brand-new free logic design concept, expanding from a single-layer to a double-layer architecture," He said, meaning that it stacks transistors into two layers. A similar-sounding technology has also been the subject of research by Intel and TSMC."Before LogicFolding, it took three years to lift transistor density from 126 to 155 MTr/mm² [million transistors per square millimeter]. In 2026, LogicFolding takes it...