Huawei has proposed a new semiconductor design principle called the Tau Scaling Law, as the chip industry faces growing limits in making smaller processors.
The company introduced the idea at the 2026 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems in Shanghai, where Huawei executive He Tingbo delivered a keynote on a new path for chip development.
For decades, the semiconductor industry has followed Moore’s Law, which is based on packing more transistors into chips by shrinking their size.
That approach has helped improve smartphones, laptops, AI systems, and other devices. However, chipmaking is now becoming more difficult and expensive as the industry approaches physical and financial limits.
Huawei says Tau Scaling Law offers another path by focusing less on physical shrinkage and more on reducing signal delay inside chips. In simple terms, the company wants to shorten the time signals take to move across a chip, which could improve speed and energy efficiency.
A key part of Huawei’s strategy is a chip architecture called LogicFolding. The idea is to reorganize chip logic so signals travel through a more compact and efficient structure instead of moving across longer paths.
Huawei says this approach works across devices, circuits, chips, and full computing systems. According to He Tingbo, Huawei has already designed and mass-produced 381 chips over the past six years using ideas connected to the new scaling method.
Huawei’s next Kirin mobile chip, expected later this autumn, will reportedly be the first major commercial product to use the LogicFolding architecture.
The company claims the technology will improve both performance and energy efficiency. Huawei also says chips developed under Tau Scaling Law could reach a transistor density equivalent to advanced 1.4nm process technology by 2031.
That does not mean Huawei is necessarily preparing to manufacture a true 1.4nm chip through traditional methods. Instead, the company is arguing that better chip architecture and signal optimization could deliver performance levels similar to chips made on more advanced process nodes.
Huawei also used the event to call for wider industry cooperation. He Tingbo said no single company can solve the semiconductor industry’s challenges alone.
The proposal comes as chipmakers face slower gains from traditional transistor shrinking, making new design methods increasingly important for future processors.
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