He Tingbo used a Shanghai keynote to argue that cutting signal-propagation time, not shrinking transistors, is the new frontier, and that Huawei has been quietly building chips around the idea for six years.
Huawei used the opening day of the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems in Shanghai on Monday to argue that the global semiconductor industry needs a different organising principle, and that it has one ready.
He Tingbo, who runs Huawei’s semiconductor business and chairs its Scientist Committee, told the conference the company has spent the past six years developing what it calls the Tau (τ) Scaling Law, and is now applying it across its chip line.
The proposition is that geometric scaling, the steady shrinking of transistors that has guided the industry for more than fifty years, is no longer doing the work it used to.
The τ Scaling Law puts the time it takes for signals and data to move through a chip and its surrounding system at the centre of design instead, according to the company’s announcement.
