Huawei Unveils Chip Design Advances Amid US Sanctions

Huawei Technologies announced on Monday (25) that within five years it will manufacture chips using a new industry-leading technology, highlighting Beijing's efforts to counteract US sanctions that have hampered China's production of sophisticated chips.

Huawei, at a semiconductor symposium in Shanghai, said its cutting-edge chips will have transistor density equivalent to 1.4-nanometer processes by 2031, but did not provide independent performance data.

The target is significant as China's most advanced proven chipmaking capability is widely seen at around 7 nanometers, while 1.4 nanometers is expected to be close to the global frontier for advanced chipmaking by the end of the decade.

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In general, experts consider it unlikely that China will reach this level through conventional manufacturing alone, as Washington has restricted its access to advanced lithography tools and other key semiconductor technologies.

Taiwanese TSMC, the world's largest producer of the most advanced chips, currently uses a 2-nanometer manufacturing technology and plans to introduce a 1.4-nanometer process for mass production in 2028.

"Tau Scaling Law"
Huawei on Monday unveiled a new principle for improving chips, noting that the industry can no longer rely on shrinking transistors to achieve advances in computing, a pattern known as Moore's Law, as they have become so small that their dimensions are measured in just a few atoms.

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The Tau Scaling Law, as the principle is called, instead focuses on reducing the time it takes for signals and data to travel through chips and computing systems, Huawei said.

While the global chip industry is increasingly investing in post-Moore's Law solutions, from advanced packaging to chiplets, the search has become especially urgent for China.

U.S. export controls have restricted Chinese companies' access to the most advanced chipmaking tools, especially the equipment needed to produce microprocessors at cutting-edge process nodes.

This has made alternative routes to higher performance essential to Beijing's goal of creating a world-leading, self-reliant semiconductor sector.

"What Huawei is proposing is a shift from traditional node-driven scaling to system-level efficiency scaling," said He Hui, director of semiconductor research at Omdia.

"Rather than relying solely on smaller transistors, the company is focusing on shortening the interconnect, reducing latency, and improving data movement within the chip, which is a reliable way to extract more performance when high-end lithography is constrained."

More AI, more risks
The risks of Huawei's chip advances are doubly high as cutting-edge technologies have become an increasingly important pillar of China's future economic development and geopolitical leverage.

Huawei's Ascend series of chips are central to Chinese AI models, including DeepSeek's latest V4 flagship model, launched last month.

Huawei said its Kirin smartphone chips, scheduled to launch later this year, will be the first to use a Tau Scaling Law architecture called LogicFolding, which the company says shrinks the size of interconnects within chips and significantly improves performance.

LogicFolding will also be applied to Ascend chips by 2030, as well as to large AI clusters made up of hundreds or thousands of chips in data centers, the company said.

Huawei added that its microprocessor division has designed and mass-produced 381 chips over the past six years based on the Tau Scaling Law for use in industries such as smartphones and AI computing.

Alternative to Nvidia
Huawei was included in a US trade blacklist in 2019, which prevented it from

use many U.S.-origin technologies, including chips and software, which has restricted its ability to rely on globally contracted chipmakers.

Huawei went into what it described as an "extreme survival mode" after the restrictions were imposed. A secret chip project led by He Tingbo, president of Huawei's semiconductor business and director of the Committee of Scientists, has become central to its survival strategy.

The company made a surprise comeback in 2023 with the launch of the 5G-capable Mate 60 series smartphones, powered by a system-on-chip produced by China's largest contract chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), using 7-nanometer technology.

SMIC shares rose 7.6% this Monday following Huawei's announcement of its LogicFolding architecture. SMIC has also recently invested in post-Moore's Law pathways, establishing an advanced encapsulation research institute in Shanghai in January.

Demand for Ascend chips has surged in China this year as domestic technology companies seek alternatives to US firm Nvidia, whose most advanced AI processors are blocked from being sold in China.

Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said earlier this month that the company had "largely ceded" China's AI chip market to Huawei.

While acknowledging progress, analysts say China continues to lag behind global leaders in the most advanced process technology.

"Cost, power, temperature and systems integration continue to be key challenges, especially for cloud AI servers," said Brady Wang, associate director at Counterpoint Research.

"In the short term, China may close the gap with global leaders, but the technological gap with the most advanced nodes will still remain," he added.

Huawei chip chief He acknowledged that its latest approach still faces major hurdles, including the need for new chip design tools suited to Tau Scaling and the challenge of avoiding overheating, from mobile chips to large AI data centers.

"Considering all the various constraints, we found some very good solutions... I can say with confidence that in the next 10 years, our solutions for mobile computing and AI computing will be competitive," said He.

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Source: CNN