Huawei (华为) executive Xu Zhijun: chip "Tao's Law" requires the whole industry to participate, but I don't intend to try to persuade anyone

Huawei (华为) executive Xu Zhijun (徐直军) said the newly public "Tao's Law" (韬定律) — unveiled by He Tingbo (何庭波) at a May symposium — could open an alternative path for China's semiconductor industry, but "I don't intend to try to persuade anyone," it has been reported. The core message: the idea will spread only if it proves economically and technically viable. Short sentence. Big implications.

What is "Tao's Law" and why it matters

"Tao's Law" promotes replacing traditional geometric node scaling with a form of "time scaling" (时间缩微), and advancing designs through a technique called logic folding (逻辑折叠) that is largely agnostic to process node. Reportedly the approach allows chips to be implemented usefully at 28nm, 7nm or 3nm and even across heterogeneous two-layer dies with different process nodes. It does not reject node advancement — Xu emphasized that advanced process progress still helps — but it aims to reduce dependence on bleeding‑edge foundry access by changing architecture and tooling.

Industry call, tool bottlenecks and geopolitical context

Xu acknowledged that the biggest bottleneck is EDA (electronic design automation) tooling and that Huawei alone cannot build the ecosystem needed. He said the industry — academia, EDA vendors and design houses — must participate if the approach is to scale. Why the urgency? After US export controls and sanctions constrained Huawei’s access to advanced foundry services, Chinese firms have been racing to find alternative technical and supply‑chain paths. Reportedly Xu argued the market will choose: if Tao's Law lets firms build capable chips cheaply on mature nodes, companies will adopt it without persuasion.

Background: it has been reported that Tao's Law grew out of Huawei's post‑2020 push into chip self‑reliance, including an internal project codenamed "Mo Ye" after the Haung family sword legend, and that Xu sent internal comms to HiSilicon (海思) staff to keep current products shipping even as future schedules slowed. Peking University (北京大学) has since announced progress on "true 3D" EDA prototypes to support logic‑folded layouts and placement at large scale — a sign that academic groups are already responding to the tooling challenge. The question now: will the wider ecosystem move fast enough to make Tao's Law more than a strategic idea?