Huawei Technologies Co (華為) said it has come up with a new pathway to shorten its gap with industry leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), potentially achieving a breakthrough in making advanced semiconductors without cutting-edge equipment.
Right now there is about a five-year gap between what TSMC is capable of and what Huawei, together with its manufacturing partner Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (中芯), can produce.
Huawei is to start making 1.4-nanometer chips by 2031 with its own “LogicFolding” technology, Huawei semiconductor chief He Tingbo (何庭波) said in a rare public appearance during a chip conference yesterday, while TSMC has said that it would begin mass production of the same product in 2028.
Photo: Reuters
He added that the Kirin mobile chips, set to be launched this fall, would be the first to adopt the LogicFolding architecture, which helps boost the chip performance by increasing the number of transistors it carries and optimizing data transmission speed.
“This year we have prepared a surprise for the whole industry. Not saturation, not continuation, but a big leap ahead,” she said.
If Huawei could manage to make 1.4-nanometer semiconductors in large quantities, the company would be defying the industry consensus that Dutch supplier ASML Holding NV’s state-of-the-art extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines are necessary to commercially produce 5-nanometer — or even more advanced — chips. Such semiconductors are used for the most sophisticated artificial intelligence technologies.
While He said that her team has found a way for “sustainable evolution,” she did not specify how the company would be able to advance its chipmaking prowess significantly without the use of EUV.
She added that the LogicFolding architecture is based on Huawei’s own Tau Scaling Law, a principle the Chinese company is adopting to rival Moore’s Law, which has served as a guideline for the global chip industry development for decades.
Huawei’s new principle appears to focus on boosting data transmission speed to compensate for a lack of state-of-the-art equipment needed to shrink transistors.
“We saw time scaling can deliver strong benefits across devices, circuits, chips and systems,” He said, adding that Huawei has designed and produced 381 chips over the past six years conforming to the Tau Scaling Law.
Huawei, in a separate statement, said that the company is dubbing its new principle “Her’s Law,” in a nod to its chip chief.
While Huawei has continued to improve its technologies over the past few years, it is unclear whether it would be able to reach the cutting edge of chipmaking by experimenting with a non-mainstream path.
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