Huawei Unveils New Chip Law, Promises Major Kirin Boost This Fall
Huawei Technologies officially introduced "Tao's Law" at the 2026 International Symposium on Circuits and Systems held in Shanghai on May 25, marking China's first systematic principle guiding semiconductor industry development on the global stage. The company has successfully designed and mass-produced 381 chips over the past six years based on this new framework.
He Tingbo, director at Huawei and president of its semiconductor business unit, presented the principle in a keynote speech titled "New Pathways and Practices in Semiconductors." The announcement comes as the global chip industry grapples with the physical and economic limitations of Moore's Law.
Tao's Law proposes replacing "geometric scaling" with "temporal scaling," focusing on systematically reducing time constants (denoted by the Greek letter tau, τ) to compress signal propagation delays and continuously increase transistor density. This approach aims to sustain semiconductor and electronic system evolution through innovations such as logic folding technology.
The principle establishes a multi-level collaborative optimization system spanning devices, circuits, chips, and entire systems. Huawei projects that by 2031, high-end chips developed under Tao's Law will achieve transistor densities equivalent to 1.4-nanometer process nodes.
He emphasized the company's commitment to global collaboration: "The future must belong to open cooperation. Under the pathway of Tao's Law, we look forward to working closely with scientists, engineers, and industry partners worldwide to jointly advance the semiconductor and electronics industries."
The upcoming Kirin 2026 mobile phone chip, scheduled for release this autumn, will be the first to fully implement logic folding technology, delivering significant performance improvements. He stated that the new chip represents the successful implementation of logic folding technology for the first time, based on a novel free logic design concept that expands from single-layer to dual-layer architecture.
"We have achieved a series of advances that are difficult to obtain through advanced process technology alone," He said. After launching the Kirin 9030 Pro in 2025, Huawei's mobile phone chips entered a performance "saturation zone," prompting the company to explore new pathways through temporal scaling rather than relying solely on geometric miniaturization.
He outlined Huawei's roadmap: "Over the next decade, we will continue toward full folding and even multi-layer folding, continuously optimizing full-stack performance from devices and circuits to chips and systems." From 2026 to 2035, as exploratory technologies gradually commercialize, transistor density and operating frequencies will continue to rise, enabling Huawei to launch mobile phone chips with superior performance.
"Our solution is viable and sustainable. The performance of our new chips can completely continue to benchmark against the alternative pathway," He concluded.
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