Huawei’s He Tingbo says autumn Kirin chip marks a “leap”, unveils a new semiconductor roadmap called “Tao (韬) law”

New law, new metric: time instead of geometry

He Tingbo (何庭波), Huawei (华为) board director and president of its semiconductor business, told attendees at the 2026 International Circuits and Systems Symposium that the company will ship a new Kirin (麒麟) smartphone chip this autumn that “represents a leap” over last year’s design. It has been reported that the chip is the first to be built as a full implementation of Huawei’s newly proposed “Tao (τ) law” — a shift from traditional geometry-driven Moore’s Law toward what He describes as “time-scaling,” where techniques such as logical folding compress signal propagation delay to boost effective performance and transistor density.

From metaphor to engineering practice

He walked the audience through the idea with a city metaphor: if a growing city becomes too crowded, instead of shrinking space, stack districts and add millions of elevators to shorten travel time. In technical terms, Huawei says it has pursued multi-layered co‑optimization across device, circuit, chip and system levels and claims 381 internally developed chips over six years across photonics, data comms, wireless, 5G, consumer and AI compute lines. It has been reported that Huawei positions this body of work as the empirical backbone of the “Tao” proposal and calls the upcoming Kirin the first complete “Tao chip.”

Sanctions and self-reliance — the geopolitical backdrop

The announcement is framed by geopolitical reality. Huawei was added to the U.S. Commerce Department’s entity list in 2019, and He said those export controls forced the company to accelerate home‑grown alternatives and rethink fundamental device architectures. She described that period as a survival test that converted many contingency projects into mainstream products. These comments underscore how U.S. export controls and broader technology decoupling are driving Chinese firms to pursue alternative semiconductor trajectories — and to tout new foundational principles as industry contributions.

Skepticism, adoption and the industry test

Huawei officials say the Tao law could guide semiconductor evolution for the next five to ten years and that the autumn Kirin will demonstrate “accelerated” gains in performance, integration and transistor density compared with last year. It has been reported that the company forecasts long‑term transistor‑density progress comparable to future sub‑nanometer nodes under this paradigm. Independent verification will be needed, and export controls and supply‑chain realities remain constraints. Still, He invited peers to collaborate: could this be China’s answer to the slowing of Moore’s Law — and will the broader industry follow?