Huawei's 'Chip Queen' Throws Down the Gauntlet

The great AI chip race just got a lot more interesting. Tingbo He, president of Huawei's chip-design subsidiary HiSilicon, has announced that her company's engineers have developed a new way to optimize semiconductors. He believes this approach will close the performance gap between Chinese and Western chips over the next few years.

He's method focuses on speeding up computations across chips, circuits, and entire computing systems, rather than trying to cram more components onto a single piece of silicon. At the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems in Shanghai last weekend, He said her company had found a new path. She promised that Huawei would prove the viability of this approach with a new chip in the coming months.

The new approach is called Tau's Scaling Law, which He says has replaced Moore's Law as HiSilicon's guiding principle. Moore's Law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, dictates that progress in computing depends on roughly doubling the number of transistors or logic gates packed into a chip every two years. He hinted that a major breakthrough is on the horizon, saying "Before winter 2026, we will bring the surprise.

Not saturation, not continuation, but a big leap ahead." The chip industry has been running into the limits of Moore's Law, with transistors now just a few nanometers wide, causing quantum effects to interfere with their normal functioning. Huawei's announcement suggests that the company believes it has found a way around these limits. The sanctions aimed at kneecapping China's chip industry may have spurred innovations that allow the country to build a more advanced domestic chip industry and compete with the West.

He highlighted several ways that Huawei has advanced chip performance using its new approach, including something called LogicFolding, which reduces the time required to perform key logical operations within a circuit. HiSilicon is also improving chip performance by accounting for nanoscale electronic phenomena, designing chips to work well together, and developing interconnects that speed chip-to-chip communication. Huawei says it will use its new approach to produce components with performance equivalent to a 1.4-nanometer chipmaking process by 2031.

This would significantly reduce China's chipmaking lag, as TSMC is expected to introduce chips using this process in 2028. While it's unclear if Huawei's strategy will be viable, He seems confident that the company will change the game. "These innovations will enter mass production," she said.