Huawei has published a paper directly rebutting overheating concerns that have been flagged as the main weakness of the next-generation chips it is developing under its own "Tau Scaling Law."
He Tingbo, president of Huawei's semiconductor business unit, pushed back against skepticism that stacking logic circuits vertically would create an insurmountable thermal bottleneck, according to a paper posted on the 4th to ChinaXiv, the Chinese Academy of Sciences' preprint platform for science and technology papers, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post reported on the 7th. In the paper, He said Huawei's Kirin 2026 chip, built on the Tau Scaling Law, raised transistor density by 55% from the previous model and cut power consumption by up to 66% in some key tasks.
The Tau Scaling Law is a theory of semiconductor performance gains that Huawei presented in May this year, saying it would replace Moore's Law. Moore's Law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, holds that the number of transistors packed onto a chip doubles about every two years, doubling performance as well. But some now argue the approach is running into limits, as it has become difficult to keep raising transistor density inside chips that have shrunk to nanometer scale.
The Tau Scaling Law that Huawei proposed to address this takes its name from tau (τ), the time constant used in physics. Its core claim is that chip performance can be improved through techniques such as "logic folding," which raises transistor density by reducing resistive and capacitive loads in signal transmission. Rather than spreading circuits across a flat plane, the design stacks substrates vertically, as if folding paper, to shorten the distance signals must travel.
The Tau Scaling Law drew attention as the first such law China has presented to the global semiconductor industry, but critics have persistently argued it would be vulnerable to heat and would struggle to achieve stable yields. In the new paper, however, He said Huawei's new chip raises density while cutting power consumption, allowing it to shift flexibly between constrained operation and peak performance.
Huawei, Spearhead of China's Chip Self-Reliance, Sees Profit Slide as R&D Costs Soar
Huawei, which has become a symbol of China's push for technological self-reliance, is seeing its net profit shrink sharply as spending on semiconductor research and development rises.
The company said revenue in the first half of this year, from January to June, rose 9.6% from a year earlier to 467.82 billion yuan (about 95.2 trillion won), while net profit fell 36% to 23.81 billion yuan (about 4.8 trillion won).
As Huawei increased investment in artificial intelligence, telecommunications technology and smart devices, first-half R&D spending rose 25% from a year earlier to 121.38 billion yuan, equal to 25.9% of first-half revenue. China views U.S. restrictions on advanced semiconductors as a chokehold on its economy and has emphasized resolving the issue through self-reliance, with Huawei widely seen as central to that effort.
Huawei introduced the Tau Scaling Law this year as a way to overcome the limits of Moore's Law. The new paper on heat is the third Huawei has released since unveiling the law. In the first paper in May, He laid out a plan to bring Huawei's process technology to 1.4 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, by 2031 without the advanced extreme ultraviolet lithography machines that are subject to U.S. controls. In a second paper in July, he said a Huawei smartphone processor set for release soon would show a 55% improvement in density over the company's earlier Kirin 9030 Pro chip.
Huawei has also unveiled the Atlas 950 SuperPod, an AI computing supernode system, saying it would overcome the performance limits of individual chips by bundling them together.
