He Tingbo, a Huawei board member and president of the company’s semiconductor business department, unveils the Tau (τ) Scaling Law, on March 25, 2026. Photo: People’s Daily

At a seminar held in Shanghai on Monday, Huawei formally unveiled the Tau (τ) Scaling Law, marking the first time China has proposed a new principle to guide industrial development in the global semiconductor sector, People's Daily reported.

The announcement was made by He Tingbo, a Huawei board member and president of the company's semiconductor business department, during a keynote speech titled "New Semiconductor Path in Practice" at the 2026 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), which opened in Shanghai on Monday.

Based on the law, Huawei has successfully designed and mass-produced 381 chips over the past six years. This autumn, the company will launch a new Kirin smartphone chip that fully adopts logic-folding technology, significantly improving related performance, according to the report.

The Tau Scaling Law proposes replacing "geometric scaling" with "time scaling." With the systematic reduction of the time constant, or tau (τ), as its objective, the law seeks to continuously compress signal propagation delays through innovative technologies such as logic folding, thereby steadily increasing transistor density and enabling the sustained evolution of semiconductors and electronic systems, the report said.

In recent years, Moore's Law has faced growing challenges from both physical limits and economic returns. As the pace of transistor "geometric scaling" slows and cost advantages gradually diminish, how to break through the constraints of the traditional process-driven path and explore a new, sustainable route of evolution to meet today's exponentially rising demand for computing performance has become a common challenge that the global semiconductor industry urgently needs to address.

The Tau Scaling Law establishes a multi-level collaborative optimization framework spanning devices, circuits, chips and systems. By 2031, the transistor density of high-end chips developed under the law is expected to reach a level equivalent to the 1.4-nanometer process, the report said.

Speaking about the future development of the semiconductor industry, He said the future will belong to openness and cooperation. "Under the path set by the Tau Scaling Law, we look forward to working closely with scientists, engineers and industry partners around the world to jointly promote the sustained development of the semiconductor and electronics industries," He said.

Global Times