Huawei plans new smartphone chips this fall as competition from Nvidia and Apple intensifies

SHANGHAI – Chinese tech giant Huawei on Monday touted a new approach to developing advanced semiconductors despite U.S. sanctions. Nvidia The company is struggling to sell high-end chips in China.

Huawei announced that it has developed a new engineering approach called “LogicFolding” to manufacture chips for Kirin smartphones this fall.

The breakthrough comes as follows Nvidia Facing U.S. export restrictions in China; apple It is fighting new competition from Huawei in the world’s second-largest consumer economy.

Huawei’s Mate 60 smartphone, launched in 2023, featured 5G connectivity with an advanced chip that helped the company regain market share from Apple.

In recent years, U.S. regulations have prevented Nvidia from selling cutting-edge chips to China, but the Chinese government has instead pushed to support domestic technology. Last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC that the U.S. chipmaker had “conceded” the Chinese market to Huawei.

“For NVIDIA, this means fewer opportunities to sell advanced chips like the H200 to China,” said George Chen, partner and co-chair of the Asia Group’s digital practice.

“This line is likely to raise concerns in Washington, where Huawei remains a symbol of U.S. export controls,” he said.

Huawei said its new chip technology can achieve functionality equivalent to 1.4-nanometer process technology by 2031, while global chip leader TSMC has begun mass production of 2-nanometer chips.

Nanometer processing refers to a chip manufacturing technology that typically allows for faster and more efficient semiconductors with smaller nodes.

Paul Triolo, head of technology for Asia and the Americas at DGA Group, was skeptical of Huawei’s 1.4 nanometer claim.

“Although the stacked/folded design may provide effective density enhancement, it does not mean that Huawei has solved all the process, yield, power, thermal, and device performance issues associated with true 1.4nm-class manufacturing,” he said.

Evaluation of Dutch chip equipment maker’s advanced extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography equipment blocked ASMLNeil Shah, vice president of research at Counterpoint Research, said Huawei is being forced to pursue alternatives to chip development to remain competitive in the AI ​​field.

“However, this parallel semiconductor path has not yet been proven at large scale. This approach introduces severe thermal constraints and packaging complexity, which can impact manufacturing yields,” Shah said.

Huawei’s efforts to bring the technology to its flagship Mate 90 series of smartphones this fall will be an engineering feat, but extending it to AI data centers will be “the ultimate litmus test for China’s creative workarounds against Western sanctions,” he added.

Huawei is also seeking better academic recognition for its semiconductor research. The company on Monday described its discovery as the “tau law,” or “τ scaling,” and claimed it addresses a challenge facing the semiconductor industry.

Huawei announced that it has designed and mass-produced 381 chips based on the τ scaling method over the past six years.

For decades, semiconductor development has relied on “Moore’s Law,” in which the number of transistors doubles approximately every two years, providing more computing power while reducing cost. But even NVIDIA’s Huang says Moore’s Law no longer applies to future chip development.

“Huawei is turning its engineering strategy into a quasi-‘law,'” Toriolo said.

The new principles are “rather system-level optimization principles that shorten wiring, stack logic, improve memory semantics, and co-design chips, packages, software, and clusters,” he said.

Still, challenges remain when it comes to thermal management and large-scale manufacturing, Toriolo said.

Timbo He, president of Huawei’s semiconductor business, said Huawei’s new chip architecture expands the layout from one layer to two layers and significantly improves power efficiency.

This structure allows the transistors to interact at more points, He, who is also director of the company’s board of scientists, said at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ International Symposium on Circuits and Systems.

However, she acknowledged that challenges remain, as Huawei has only just begun a 10-year development path of new technology.