SHANGHAI — Huawei’s semiconductor chief He Tingbo walked on stage at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS 2026) on Monday and did something no Chinese company has done before. She proposed a new guiding principle for the semiconductor industry.
She called it the Tao Law (韬定律, τ-Law).
The core claim is simple, if you read the paper published on ChinaXiv (202605.00224): stop trying to shrink transistors. That path is tapped out. Instead, stack them vertically and reorganize how signals travel between them. Huawei calls this “logic folding” (逻辑折叠).
The first real product is the Kirin 2026 mobile chip, coming this fall.
Numbers from He’s presentation, per IT之家:
– Transistor density jumps from 155 MTr/mm² to 238 MTr/mm² in a single generation. That is a 53.5% increase.
– Peak CPU frequency hits 3.1 GHz. The Kirin 9030 Pro (2025) topped out at 2.75GHz.
– P-core energy efficiency improves 41%.
– Clock buffer count drops by over 50%. Wiring length drops about 30%.
All achieved without a new lithography node. Huawei says the logic folding approach works on the same process they already have.
The 2026 chip is intentionally conservative, per the paper. Hybrid bonding pitch is 1.5 μm. Folding only applies to critical paths, not the whole design. Even so, it delivers what used to take three years of node shrinks.
He Tingbo’s roadmap extends to 2035. The plan: transistor density eventually reaches 400+ MTr/mm². CPU cores hit 4 GHz and beyond. The Kirin 2027 is already in silicon. Kirin 2028 and 2029 are in pre-silicon development.
On the AI side, Ascend 910C ships in 2025. Ascend 950 follows in 2026. The Ascend 990, expected around 2030, will also adopt logic folding. Hardware integration gains are projected at 100x by 2035.
Some skepticism is warranted here. Huawei has produced 381 chip designs over six years under this framework. That is a large number. Not all of them are high-end, and “designed” is not “shipped in volume.” The company has a credibility gap to close.
But the engineering logic is real. The paper is public. The data is on the slides.
What matters more is the signal. China’s chip industry is no longer trying to catch up on the same metric. It changed the metric. Whether that works at scale is the question I do not have an answer to yet. We will know when the Mate 90 series ships with this chip later this year.
Also from the show floor: the Huawei nova 16 series appeared on the official website today with four models (Ultra, Pro, 16, 16z). Launch event is June 1. And the Xiaomi 17 Max, announced last week with an 8000mAh battery and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, went on sale today at 4299 RMB (subsidized).