Huawei Launches 'Tao Law', Aims to Match Global Leading Standards by 2031

Huawei announced on Monday that they have developed a semiconductor manufacturing solution that does not rely on advanced photolithography machines, planning to achieve a transistor density comparable to Intel's and other global top products by 2031. This is the latest development of Chinese companies looking for ways to break through the semiconductor blockade.

Huawei officially named this solution the "Tao (τ) Law," which was released by Director and President of the Semiconductor Business Department He Tingbo at the IEEE International Circuits and Systems Symposium in Shanghai. Its core logic is to replace the traditional "geometric miniaturization" with "temporal miniaturization" - instead of pursuing smaller transistors, it continuously enhances the transistor density and system performance by compressing signal propagation delay and advancing circuit stacking (i.e., "logic folding" technology). He Tingbo said, "Our solution is feasible and the cost is controllable."

Over the past six years, Huawei has mass-produced 381 types of chips using this method. The "Kirin 2026" mobile phone chip to be released this fall is the first complete implementation of the logic folding technology. He Tingbo said, "In the next ten years, we will continue to move towards full folding and even towards more layers of folding."

Bypassing the blockade and forging a new path

The core path of Moore's Law is to continuously reduce the size of transistors on the same planar silicon wafer, and this direction is facing a dual ceiling of physical and economic benefits. TSMC, Intel, and Samsung are competing to be the first to mass produce 1.4-nanometer process chips in the next few years with the help of Dutch ASML's extreme ultraviolet lithography machines.

Since Huawei was included in the U.S. export control entity list in 2019 and further faced a comprehensive semiconductor technology blockade after 2022, ASML equipment is no longer available. The proposal of the "Tao Law" is formed under these constraints as an alternative route: optimizing device resistance, parasitic capacitance, and interconnection protocols, and reconstructing the performance of the computing system through a full-stack collaborative design of "software, architecture, chips."

Research institute Omdia's Singapore-based analyst, Su Lianjie, commented that whether Huawei's solution can form a clear advantage remains to be observed, "But it is at least a feasible alternative path and a breakthrough found by Huawei under supply chain restrictions."

The road to verification is still long

There is still a considerable distance between the proposal of a technical route and its large-scale implementation. Circuit layering can cause cooling problems and requires engineers to write more complex multi-layer coordination code. The Wall Street Journal, citing informed sources, revealed that Huawei's relatively stable results in this technology have only been achieved in the last year, and it still needs time to prove the feasibility of large-scale application to data centers and equipment manufacturers. Huawei also did not provide independent third-party evaluation data on chip performance.

If the "Tao Law" is ultimately verified on a large scale, its impact will go beyond Huawei itself - it means that the strategy of Western countries to restrict China's chip capabilities by controlling the export of manufacturing equipment has the possibility of being systematically bypassed. Huawei has set 2031 as the target node, several years later than TSMC and other competitors' 1.4-nanometer mass production plans, but it is a completely different path.