LogicFolding Kirin smartphone chips will ship this year.
LogicFolding Kirin smartphone chips will ship this year.
@kimmonismus ban a country from your tools, they don't quit, they invent new physics
Chinas Huawei can't access EUV. So they wrote their own scaling law. The leverage of US export controls erodes. Huawei just presented the Tau (τ) Scaling Law at IEEE ISCAS, a framework that replaces geometric transistor scaling with time-based optimization across devices, circuits, chips, and systems. Huawei is not trying to win the nanometer race anymore. They're redefining it. 381 chips designed and mass-produced over six years. Kirin chips with their new LogicFolding architecture ship this fall. Target by 2031: transistor density equivalent to 1.4nm processes - without EUV (ASML embargo still hits hard) Whether Tau Scaling delivers on that promise remains to be seen. But it shows one thing: US export controls cut Huawei off from cutting-edge lithography, and instead of hitting a wall, they built a parallel road. China's semiconductor independence isn't hypothetical anymore. It's shipping in phones, running AI workloads, and now has its own scaling law presented at one of the world's top circuit design conferences. If Huawei can close the performance gap through architecture instead of lithography, the entire leverage of US export controls erodes. The sanctions were designed to keep China two generations behind. Huawei is trying to make that metric irrelevant. h/t @AndrewCurran_ for finding this interesting blogarticle and @zephyr_z9 for the photo
