Huawei Proposes New Chip Scaling Law to Bypass American Sanctions

Huawei announced a new chip development strategy at the opening of the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems in Shanghai. He Tingbo, a company representative, proposed reconsidering the very logic of progress in the semiconductor industry.

A New Perspective on Performance

Traditionally, chip performance has grown because transistors become smaller—Moore's Law, which has driven the industry for half a century. Huawei proposes a different approach: instead of reducing size, focus on reducing the time it takes for an electrical signal to travel through the chip. The company named this new principle the Tau Scaling Law.

He Tingbo emphasizes that this is not a revolution in the sense of a fundamentally new invention, but an evolution—a transition to a new frontier of optimization. Tau (the Greek letter denoting time in physics) is a parameter that remains under engineers' control even with limitations on available manufacturing technologies. The essence is simple: if you can't make electrons faster, shorten their path.

Smaller distance between components—less propagation delay—higher clock frequency and, ultimately, higher chip performance.

Six Years of Covert Work Behind It

The key point of the announcement is not the beginning of development, but an interim milestone. Tingbo says that for six years, away from the press and the radar of the Western industry, Huawei has been developing chips based on the Tau Scaling Law principle. This means that the company already has not just ideas and prototypes, but designs ready for production. The announcement at the international IEEE conference is a statement that the technology has matured. The company is demonstrating its working approach to the global scientific community.

• Focus on signal propagation time, not transistor size
• Use of available (more mature) manufacturing processes
• Maintaining competitiveness without access to EUV lithography

Context: Sanctions as a Trigger

Behind the announcement is a concrete political reality that, paradoxically, pushed the company toward innovation. The United States has imposed broad sanctions restricting Huawei's supply of the most advanced manufacturing tools—most notably EUV lithography and chip design from ASML and ARM. Without these, the standard path—following Moore's Law by moving to ever smaller process nodes (5nm, 3nm, 2nm)—became impossible for Huawei. Instead, Huawei proposed a different game: if you can't play by Western rules, rewrite the rules yourself.

What This Means

If the Tau Scaling Law demonstrates practical effectiveness—and Huawei claims it already does in its chips—this could fundamentally change the balance in the semiconductor industry. A company without access to ASML's advanced capabilities could remain competitive through other optimization parameters. For the rest of the world, this means that new approaches to chip performance will develop in parallel to Western standards, rather than following them.