May 25, 2026 | Burma Independent Voice
Chinese tech giant Huawei on Monday announced the development of a pioneering semiconductor manufacturing technology designed to overcome U.S. sanctions that have blocked its access to the world’s most advanced chipmaking equipment.
Huawei has been at the epicenter of intense geopolitical friction between Washington and Beijing for several years, triggered by U.S. allegations that the company’s hardware could be leveraged by the Chinese government for espionage operations. Huawei has consistently and categorically denied these accusations.
U.S. sanctions initiated in 2019 stripped Huawei of its ability to procure technologies and components engineered by U.S. companies and their global allies. Crucially, this included cutting-off access to cutting-edge lithography machines, which are indispensable for manufacturing the world’s most advanced microchips.
Despite these hurdles, He Tingbo, the head of Huawei’s semiconductor division, announced on Monday that the company aims to internally manufacture next-generation 1.4-nanometer ($1.4\text{ nm}$) chips by 2031. For context, Taiwan’s TSMC—currently the global leader in semiconductor manufacturing—aims to achieve a similar milestone by 2028.
Advanced chips capable of training and powering artificial intelligence (AI) models have become highly sensitive assets in the ongoing technological rivalry between the U.S. and China. While computing capabilities have scaled exponentially over recent decades, chipmakers have traditionally achieved this by packing increasingly miniscule electronic components tighter together on a single silicon wafer.
Huawei’s latest announcement implies that the company has discovered a method to bypass the need for Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems, which have long been deemed mandatory for the mass production of chips at $5\text{ nm}$ or smaller nodes.
“Over the past six years… I have frequently been asked how we survived and managed to return to the pinnacle,” He said during a presentation at the International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) in Shanghai. She explained that the breakthrough stems from a fundamental paradigm shift that completely challenges conventional chip manufacturing concepts.
Under Moore’s Law—posited by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore—the number of transistors packed onto a microchip doubles roughly every two years. This escalating transistor density allows chips to become physically smaller, or deliver significantly faster processing speeds within a static physical footprint.
However, He Tingbo on Monday proposed an entirely alternative framework dubbed the “Tau Scaling Law” or “Her’s Law.” Under this methodology, designers deprioritize the spatial shrinkage of physical components on a chip. Instead, they focus on optimizing the “time” it takes for different components within the chip architecture to interact and communicate with one another.
This technique is designed to circumvent the ultimate physical limitation facing Moore’s Law: the reality that while physical elements can be made progressively smaller, they eventually hit an absolute physical boundary where further reduction becomes impossible.
He admitted that because of U.S. blockades, these physical scaling bottlenecks arrived “much earlier and proved far more demanding” for Huawei. “However, our workaround is both entirely viable and highly cost-effective. The performance of chips manufactured utilizing this new paradigm is fully competitive with those built via legacy paths,” she asserted.
The company revealed that its upcoming Kirin processor, slated for release this autumn, will mark the first full-scale commercial implementation of this new framework, utilizing an architecture known as “LogicFolding.”
George Chen, Managing Director and Co-Chair of the Digital Practice at The Asia Group, commented that the Tau Scaling Law demonstrates Huawei’s ambition “not merely to catch up, but to leapfrog and lead the global semiconductor race.” Chen added, “Even though a finalized commercial product has not debuted today, Huawei’s trajectory is clear, and this move will undoubtedly amplify anxieties within the U.S. administration.”
