He Tingbo unveiled the Tau Scaling Law and LogicFolding architecture at IEEE ISCAS in Shanghai, claiming Huawei can match 1.4nm chip density by 2031 without EUV lithography. The first commercial test arrives this autumn.
Huawei’s semiconductor chief He Tingbo returned to public life after seven years to unveil the Tau Scaling Law and LogicFolding architecture. The company claims it can reach 1.4nm-equivalent chip density by 2031 without EUV lithography, but faces steep hurdles in heat dissipation, EDA tooling, and yield rates.TL;DR
For seven years, He Tingbo worked in silence. The head of Huawei’s semiconductor business, widely known as the company’s “chip queen,” vanished from public view in 2019 after Washington severed the Chinese company’s access to advanced technology.
Her retreat became a symbol of Huawei’s fight for survival. That changed on 25 May at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems in Shanghai, where she delivered a keynote titled “New Semiconductor Path in Practice.”
He introduced the “Tau (τ) Scaling Law,” a principle that replaces geometric transistor shrinking with signal-propagation time as the metric of progress. Named after the Greek letter for propagation delay, the law focuses on compressing signal travel time across devices and circuits rather than making transistors physically smaller.
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Huawei claims that by 2031, high-end chips designed under this law will achieve transistor densities equivalent to a 1.4-nanometre process, all without the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines blocked by US sanctions. The company says it has already designed and mass-produced 381 chips based on the principle over the past six years.
Analysts say the underlying physics is not entirely new. Brady Wang, associate director at Counterpoint Research, noted that Design-Technology Co-Optimisation techniques have been widely used globally for years, and that Huawei is “leveraging design and packaging innovations to achieve some of the benefits typically associated with more advanced process nodes.”
However, distilling these efforts into a unified law was significant. CGTN reported that semiconductor researchers compared it directly to Gordon Moore’s seminal 1965 observation.
The physical manifestation of the Tau law is LogicFolding, a proprietary architecture that folds traditional flat circuit layouts into vertical, stacked structures. Some critics have dismissed it as a variation of advanced 3D packaging, but He Tingbo stressed the difference: traditional 3D stacking stitches prefabricated chips together, while LogicFolding redesigns a single chip’s internal blueprint from the ground up.
The design increases transistor density by 53.5%, adding 238 million transistors per square millimetre of chip area, according to Tom’s Hardware. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called the architecture “a breakthrough for Huawei” but said it posed no immediate threat to TSMC’s manufacturing dominance, noting that “TSMC and Taiwan have had this technology for 10 years.”
Huawei’s semiconductor journey under sanctions has been a saga of constraint turned into motivation. In 2019, He Tingbo published an internal letter revealing a “spare tyres” strategy, a set of backup plans Huawei had quietly prepared for exactly this scenario.
At the IEEE forum, she admitted to deep frustration, telling reporters she had felt “as if there was really no way out.” Her epiphany came from Dujiangyan, the 2,000-year-old irrigation system in Sichuan province, built without modern machinery.
She began viewing sanctions as engineering constraints to be solved, not barriers to accept.
That defiance produced results. In September 2023, Huawei launched the Mate 60 Pro smartphone, powered by the 5G-capable Kirin 9000s.
A TechInsights teardown confirmed the chip was manufactured by SMIC using its 7nm process, pushing DUV lithography tools to their limits without any EUV equipment.
Huawei has since unveiled a three-year road map for its Ascend AI processors as domestic alternatives to Nvidia, with the Ascend 950 due in 2026, the 960 in 2027, and the 970 in 2028. Founder Ren Zhengfei told People’s Daily: “There is actually no need to worry about the chip issue.”
“By using methods like stacking and clustering, computing performance is comparable to the state-of-the-art level,” Ren added.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has confirmed that Nvidia’s share of China’s high-end AI chip market plummeted from 95% to virtually zero, a statement he made at the Citadel Securities Future of Global Markets event in October 2025.
Huawei rotating chairman Xu Zhijun was blunt about the irony: “If the United States hadn’t forced our country, our companies, and our industry, we wouldn’t have done something like this. We are also grateful to the US for enabling our country’s semiconductor industry chain to truly grow,” he told reporters.
Washington remains focused on cutting off China’s access to advanced lithography. Beijing has responded by pouring billions into home-grown alternatives, and in an apparent act of retaliation, it has withheld sales approval for Nvidia’s H200 AI processors even after Washington approved their export.
He Hui, director of semiconductor research at Omdia, said “Nvidia is likely the most concerned by this development,” adding that “domestic chip performance has nearly closed the gap with the H200.” The competitive dynamics are intensifying: US export controls are pushing China’s AI chip industry away from general-purpose GPUs and toward custom ASICs, with Huawei projected to capture 62% of China’s domestic AI accelerator market in 2026.
Laila Khawaja of Gavekal Research framed the broader stakes. Huawei is “presenting foreign governments and companies with a choice: cooperate and share the potential upside from China’s experiment, or risk an alternative Chinese ecosystem that could erode their position in the critical China market, and potentially global markets,” she wrote.
The Tau Scaling Law and LogicFolding face formidable obstacles. Folding circuits into multiple active layers causes heat density to jump five to ten times, according to ICwise, the Shanghai semiconductor research firm.
Traditional 2D EDA tools cannot handle 3D LogicFolding designs, and China’s domestic EDA industry is still racing to catch up. Empyrean Technology recently unveiled Argus, a 3D IC physical verification platform it described as “a key carrier” for implementing the Tau law.
Commercially viable yield rates when stacking three to four active layers remain extremely difficult, ICwise warned. Morningstar analyst Phelix Lee offered a broader caution, noting in a research note that Huawei’s approach may not be easily replicable by other companies, given its vertically integrated ecosystem.
The first commercial LogicFolding architecture is expected to debut this autumn in Kirin processors for Huawei’s next-generation smartphones. It will be the strongest proof yet of whether the Tau Scaling Law can move from theory to mass production.
Jensen Huang has warned that Chinese AI running on Huawei chips would be “a horrible outcome” for America. Whether LogicFolding delivers on its promise or stumbles under the weight of heat, yield, and tooling challenges, He Tingbo’s return to the spotlight has already redrawn the terms of the chip war.
As she told People’s Daily: “We not only opened up the road, but also built a highway.”
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