But does it do anything that hasn’t already been done?
Updated: May 29, 2026 3:43 pm
Huawei hopes to reduce the impact of China’s chipmaking restrictions by focusing on processing power, avoiding Moore’s Law. The method, which ignores the idea of adding more transistors, is called the ‘Tau Scaling Law’.
Tau Scaling Law explained
As China faces restrictions from 2019, companies in the country cannot import advanced lithography equipment. This means that building a brand of chips available in the US is not an option. However, Huawei is not looking to take the ‘more transistors better’ approach.
According to reports, in an effort to compete with TSMC and its increasingly advanced manufacturing processes, Huawei is instead looking to increase transmission speeds. This sounds like some kind of (pardon the pun) single speed method, which is very focused on how fast the time signals are.
According to the report, the essence of Tau’s Law is LogicFolding, “which aims to organize logic, analog, and memory circuits in stacked, tightly connected structures”. This could be responsible for “potential improvements in density, efficiency, and clock speed over the next decade.”
Can LogicFolding work?
However, there are counter-arguments that the Tau Scaling Law is a more effective alternative to the existing, and TSMC-developed, processes. According to the president of Huawei’s semiconductor business, He Tingbo, “Moore’s Law will hit a virtual ‘wall’ within the next decade”. And “external limits [mean] that Huawei met this ‘wall’ before its peers.
Huawei also suggests the need to invent new ways to be able to “extremely and carefully separate the critical paths of logic circuits across multiple layers”, making LogicFolding a viable alternative. However, stacking and multiple layering of chips, in a way similar to how ‘LogicFolding’ is described, is not particularly new. It also has power draw issues and heat related issues.
However, Huawei is looking to provide proof of its upcoming Kirin smartphone chip. The new chip should be released later this year and, according to Huawei, uses LogicFolding to develop the latest designs. Power efficiency is reported to be improved by 41%, and top speed is increased by 13%.
The strongest dissenting voice to Tau’s Scaling Law so far? It could be Nvidia’s Jensen Huang: “This is a success for Huawei, but not a threat for TSMC,” he told reporters in Taipei this week. “How long has TSMC been using die stacking and 3D packaging now? About 10 years. So TSMC’s technology is very advanced.”
We’ll be keeping our eyes on the Kirin to see what the upcoming chip has to offer.