Context: Huawei has one of the most successful licensing businesses in the world, revealing a few months ago that, in 2024 alone, it accrued $630 million in patent licensing revenue (which is high, given it is also a high-volume implementer and therefore many of its deals are cross-licensing agreements). It is also a big fan of pools, with Strategic Planning & Key Projects Department head Emil Zhang explaining to ip fray last month why diversifying its licensing strategy has been so crucial for the company (April 20, 2026 ip fray article). Huawei has also long been investing a lot in semiconductor technologies recently – especially since 2019, when the company was first hit with U.S. sanctions over its use of various U.S. technologies, including chips and software.
What’s new:
- Huawei’s He Tingbo, President of the Semiconductor Business, today announced that the company has developed the “Tau (τ) Scaling Law”, a new principle for guiding the future development of the semiconductor industry, during her keynote speech at the 2026 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (May 25, 2026 Huawei press release).
- Huawei has designed and mass-produced 381 chips based on this law, and they have been used in a number of the company’s products in the optical communications, data communication, and wireless communications domains, as well as smartphones, intelligent driving, general-purpose computing, and AI computing solutions. The approach, which has been in development for six years now, will replace the current, traditional semiconductor evolution path that has slowed down and is seeing diminished economic returns, the company said. Meanwhile, the τ Scaling Law is set to help the global semiconductor and electronic system industries resolve the common challenges they face, and Huawei is open to working with partners on it through patent licensing.
- It is set to launch new chipsets (Kirin) in the fall of this year, using the preliminary methodology and toolchain for LogicFolding, and by 2031, the high-end chips Huawei designs based on the Ď„ Scaling Law are expected to feature a transistor density that is equivalent to 1.4 nm processes.
Direct impact: The new technology, according to Huawei, will deliver “considerably better performance”, and it will not stagnate, meaning that over the next 10 years, the performance and density of chips produced based on this law will improve steadily at a faster rate than those designed based on Moore’s Law (invented by a U.S. scientist in 1965). The chips use a 3D design, too, rather than 2D, which allows the company to layer multiple 2D planar circuits on top of each other. It adds:
“It’s like moving from a single-story home to a multi-story building, with people able to move around between floors quickly using elevators. This not only creates room for more transistors; it also lets us put core circuits closer together, shortening the time needed to transmit information between them. For chips, this transmission time is the most important indicator of frequency and performance.”
Wider ramifications: This law could indicate China’s increasing independence from the West’s chip supply. As this has only been in development for about six years, any related patents would still have a significant lifespan left. Meanwhile, patents related to more traditional semiconductor technology based on Moore’s law have likely reached (or surpassed) their 20-year expiration dates. Huawei also specifies that the τ Scaling Law does not fall into the bracket of “More than Moore” technologies that many Western companies have proposed adopting (January 7, 2025 Tech Crunch article). The τ Scaling Law replaces geometric scaling with time scaling as a new guiding principle for the evolution of both semiconductors and electronic systems.