Huawei Announces New Chip Design Breakthrough As China Grapples With US Export Controls

Huawei has announced a new approach to developing advanced semiconductors, underscoring efforts by Chinese companies to move ahead in the field despite US sanctions.

On Monday, Huawei announced that it had developed a new engineering approach, “LogicFolding”, that it will use to manufacture its Kirin smartphone chips this fall. The move could help the firm fill the void left by foreign competitors like Nvidia.

Huawei revealed that its new chip technology could deliver capabilities up to 1.4-nanometre process technology, CNBC reported. Nanometre processes indicate chip manufacturing technology, with smaller nodes typically enabling more efficient and faster semiconductors.

This makes Huawei's target significant as China's most advanced proven chipmaking ability is considered to be around 7 nm. Meanwhile,1.4 nm is seen as close to the global frontier for advanced chip manufacturing around the end of the decade.

Global chip leader TSMC has started volume production of 2-nanometre chips. It plans to start a 1.4-nm process for mass production in 2028, as per Reuters.

Huawei noted that the sector cannot rely on Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors would double roughly every two years and costs decrease, leading to more computing power.

The technology giant is choosing to go with the new Tau Scaling Law, as per South China Morning Post. The law, presented on Monday by He Tingbo, president of the firm's semiconductor business department and chair of the Huawei Scientist Committee, proposes a paradigm shift that switches the traditional geometric miniaturisation of transistors with time scaling.

Under the law, the LogicFolding architecture of Huawei will be able to reduce the resistive and capacitive load of signal propagation, increasing transistor density.

"From 2026 to 2035, as a wide range of R&D explorations goes into products, the transistor density will rise, operating frequency will surge and we keep delivering cutting edge mobile chips to the market,” He said at the 2026 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems on Monday.

LogicFolding will also be used on Ascend chips by 2030, apart from large AI clusters made up of hundreds or thousands of chips and power data centres, the company said.

Huawei said that its chip division has designed and mass-produced 381 chips based on Tau Scaling Law over the past six years for use in industries such as smartphones and AI computing. Its announcement signifies a big breakthrough as Beijing's goal of building a world-leading semiconductor sector remains hampered by US export controls.

Huawei was placed on a US trade blacklist in 2019 that cut it off from many American-origin technologies and restricted its ability to rely on global contract chipmakers.