Huawei, a Chinese company, has announced a new chip design that will let them get around U.S. sanctions and bring local chip production up to world-class standards by 2031. According to the HWSW portal, instead of the usual increase in transistor density (the basis of Moore’s Law), engineers have come up with the “Tau scaling law.” This method boosts computing power by optimizing internal wiring and cutting down on signal propagation time. The new architecture, called LogicFolding, will be available in Kirin mobile processors as early as this fall. He Tingbo, the project lead, says the goal is to create HiSilicon flagship chips that are on par with 1.4-nanometer technology, but the team’s still working on tackling issues like a lack of design tools and excessive heat dissipation in smartphones.
China wants to be a leader in the semiconductor industry. Huawei, a Chinese company, has found a solution that it thinks could take local chip manufacturing to a new level by the end of the decade, according to HWSW.
Huawei claims that within five years, China could close the gap in microchip production, which is caused, in particular, by restrictions on American technology.
The publication said that developing the lithography process is the key to increasing semiconductor performance. Usually, this is impossible without increasing transistor density, which has been the basis of Moore’s Law for decades, but Huawei thinks there’s another way.
The Chinese company announced that they’re adopting Tau’s scaling law as a new development principle. Instead of always putting more transistors on a chip, they cut down on how long it takes for signals to travel around the chip by improving how the chips are wired inside. This makes chips a lot more powerful.
Huawei announced that the LogicFolding architecture, based on this principle, will debut in new versions of Kirin smartphone processors set to launch this fall. The plan for 2031 is to make top-of-the-line HiSilicon chips with transistors that are as small as 1.4 nanometers, using the same manufacturing technology.
The project leader is engineer He Tingbo, who admitted that he and his team are still facing some serious challenges because the company is struggling to get the tools needed to design the new architecture. Engineers are also working on a solution to the heat dissipation problem, which can be a serious issue, especially for chips used in mobile devices.