Huawei Technologies Co. executive Richard Yu acknowledged that China remains reliant on older Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) lithography while domestic research teams race to build native Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) equipment, revealing that the telecommunications giant is pivoting to a radical system-level "logic folding" architecture to bypass Western semiconductor sanctions.
Speaking during an international media roundtable, Yu, Huawei’s executive director and chairman of its consumer business group, stated that while EUV machines remain essential for fabricating advanced microchips, Huawei is deploying system engineering workarounds to compensate for blocked access to cutting-edge fabrication nodes.
The technical disclosure follows the launch of Huawei’s flagship Mate 90 smartphone series, which features the company's new Tau ($\tau$) Law processor lineup. The handset line integrates the Kirin 9030 and Kirin 9035 chips in its standard and Pro models, alongside the Kirin 9050 and 9050 Pro in its top-tier Pro Max and RS Extraordinary Master editions.
Rather than relying strictly on physical geometric scaling through smaller lithographic nanometer nodes, Huawei’s Tau Law framework prioritizes time scaling to systematically compress signal propagation delay. The LogicFolding methodology breaks traditional two-dimensional layout boundaries to shorten wiring path lengths, reducing parasitic capacitance and boosting effective transistor density across circuit layers.
At the system level, the architecture incorporates Huawei's Lingqu bus protocol to unify memory semantics across compute clusters, drastically lowering end-to-end execution latency. Company projections indicate that Tau Law design principles will enable domestic Chinese chips to achieve transistor densities equivalent to a 1.4-nanometer process node by 2031, even without immediate access to commercial EUV lithography equipment.
