Huawei (华为) says it pushed hard to bring phone chips back; Kirin 9030 Pro hit a performance "saturation zone"

What He Tingbo announced at ISCAS 2026

He Tingbo (何庭波), a board director and president of Huawei (华为)’s semiconductor business unit, told delegates at the International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS 2026) that since 2020 Huawei and its partners have made “huge efforts” to return smartphone chips to the market. She said last year’s Kirin (麒麟) 9030 Pro marked a turning point — entering what Huawei describes as a performance “saturation zone” — and that the company then sought a different engineering path to break through that limit.

The new approach: τ (tau) law and LogicFolding

It has been reported that Huawei is promoting a new guiding principle it calls the “Tau (τ) law” or 韬 (τ) 定律, which replaces traditional geometric scaling with “time (τ) scaling” as the driver of semiconductor and system evolution. Central to the approach is an innovation Huawei calls “LogicFolding,” plus a multilevel co‑optimization that spans devices, circuits, chips and systems. Reportedly, the forthcoming “Kirin 2026” chip implements a new free-logic design that expands from a single to a double layer and aims to raise transistor density and reduce signal propagation delay in ways Huawei says would be difficult to achieve by process-node advances alone.

Why this matters — and the geopolitical backdrop

Why is Huawei pivoting to architectural and timing innovations rather than chasing leading-edge nodes? Because Western export controls and U.S. restrictions since 2019–2020 have constrained Huawei’s access to the most advanced foundry processes, forcing Chinese firms to pursue alternative routes to performance and efficiency. It has been reported that Huawei claims these techniques enable software–architecture–chip co‑design to cut end‑to‑end execution time and rework system interconnects (including a so‑called “Lingqu bus”) to shrink communication latency — a practical response to limits on supply of sub‑nanometer manufacturing.

Product timing and industry implications

Reportedly, Huawei also presented forecasts tied to the Tau law — including a claim that by 2031 chips based on this approach could rival the transistor-density equivalent of a 1.4nm process node — a projection that should be treated with caution. Huawei says the first large‑scale use of LogicFolding will appear in its next-generation phones, with the Mate 90 series a possible autumn debut. Whether architectural tricks can offset process-level disadvantages at scale remains an open question for the global chip industry — and a reminder that technological competition now runs on both politics and engineering.