Huawei says it can dodge US chip bans with stacked silicon tricks, giving Washington’s export controls a nasty headache by 2031.
According to the Wall Street Journal Huawei claims it has developed a workaround that could make chips on a par with those built by Intel and other leading outfits.
Huawei expects to design high-end chips by 2031 with transistor density matching products made on a 1.4-nanometre process. That level is considered the next frontier for cutting-edge semiconductors.
Intel, TSMC and Samsung Electronics are aiming to mass-produce 1.4-nanometre chips within the next few years using specialised machines made by ASML in the Netherlands.
If Huawei can make the thing work at scale, it would upset one of the semiconductor industry’s favourite assumptions. The line has long been that advanced tools and manufacturing processes are essential for top-end chips.
It could make Huawei’s chips cheaper to produce than rival silicon. That is a big “could”, but it is enough to make export-control hawks start chewing the furniture.
Huawei chip arm president He Tingbo said: “Our solution is feasible and affordable.”
The company says its plan focuses on improving computing efficiency. That means stacking multiple layers of circuits inside one chip and cutting the time needed to move data between them.
Omdia Singapore-based analyst Lian Jye Su said: “Whether Huawei will gain a distinct advantage here remains to be seen, but it’s at least an alternative path forward, a breakthrough Huawei managed to find while facing supply chain challenges.”
The US blacklisted Huawei in 2019 and tightened restrictions on China’s access to advanced semiconductor technology in 2022. Since then, Huawei has been shoved into building alternatives rather than waiting for Washington to have a change of heart.
Huawei has become central to Beijing’s push for technological self-sufficiency. It has helped build China’s domestic semiconductor supply chain while being used as a proxy punchbag in the fight between Beijing and Washington.
Huawei and Nvidia are often cast as the rival mascots of that fight. Nvidia wants to keep flogging accelerators, while Huawei is trying to prove packaging, networking and architecture can close the gap.
Huawei says it has honed its semiconductor technology for six years. It claims to have mass-produced 381 chip models using the approach.
The latest Kirin smartphone chip, due to launch this autumn, will be Huawei’s first made with what it calls “LogicFolding” architecture. The company says the design is meant to improve chip performance.
Huawei says it is using the same workaround to develop artificial intelligence chips. It did not provide an independent evaluation of chip performance, which is exactly where the bragging gets less useful.
Conventional chipmaking relies on squeezing more circuits onto one silicon wafer to make computing faster. Some analysts think that trick is getting close to a physical ceiling.
Researchers are trying to stack circuits instead, but the method is still awkward. It brings heat problems and needs more sophisticated code to coordinate the layers.
People familiar with Huawei’s progress said the company has only achieved more stable results with the technology in the past year. That makes the 2031 target look ambitious.
Huawei still needs to work with data centres and equipment vendors to prove the approach works in larger-scale systems. Until then, this is a promising workaround with plenty of places to fall over.
