Huawei plans new smartphone chips this fall as rivalry with Nvidia and Apple heats up

SHANGHAI — Chinese tech giant Huawei on Monday unveiled a new approach to developing advanced semiconductors despite U.S. sanctions. Nvidia It is having trouble selling its high-end chips in China.

Huawei said this developed A new engineering approach called “LogicFolding” will be used to produce Kirin smartphone chips this fall.

This breakthrough comes like this Nvidia The US is facing export restrictions in China and Apple It is battling renewed competition from Huawei in the world’s second-largest consumer economy.

Huawei’s Mate 60 smartphone, released in 2023, included 5G connectivity powered by an advanced chip that helped the company regain market share from Apple.

While U.S. restrictions have prevented Nvidia from selling its most advanced chips to China in recent years, Beijing has sought to support its homegrown technology instead. Last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC that the US chipmaker was “conceding” the Chinese market to Huawei.

“For Nvidia, this means the window to sell advanced chips like the H200 to China is narrowing,” said George Chen, partner and co-head of the digital practice at The Asia Group.

“This trend is likely to raise concerns in Washington, where Huawei remains a symbol of US export restrictions,” he said.

Huawei said that by 2031, the new chip technology could offer capabilities equivalent to 1.4 nanometer process technology. TSMC started mass production of 2 nanometer chips.

Nanometer processes refer to chip manufacturing technology where smaller nodes typically enable faster and more efficient semiconductors.

DGA Group’s Asia and America technology chief Paul Triolo was skeptical of Huawei’s 1.4 nanometer claim.

“A stacked/folded design can deliver effective density gains, but that doesn’t mean Huawei has solved all the process, yield, power, thermal and device performance issues associated with true 1.4nm-class manufacturing,” he said.

Dutch chip equipment maker blocked from evaluating advanced ultraviolet or EUV lithography machines ASMLNeil Shah, vice president of research at Counterpoint Research, said Huawei had to look for alternatives to chip development as it aims to remain competitive in the artificial intelligence field.

“However, the scale of this parallel semiconductor pathway is still unproven. This approach may introduce challenging thermal constraints and packaging complexities that can impact production yield,” Shah said.

He added that Huawei’s efforts to use the technology in its flagship Mate 90 smartphone series this fall would mark an engineering achievement, but that scaling it up to AI data centers would serve as “the ultimate litmus test for China’s creative workaround to Western sanctions.”

Semiconductor development has been going on for decadesMoore’s Law“, an observation that the number of transistors will double roughly every two years, providing more computing power while lowering costs. But even Nvidia’s Huang has said Moore’s Law no longer applies to future chip development.

“Huawei is turning an engineering strategy into a quasi-‘law’,” Triolo said.

The new principle is “more of a system-level optimization doctrine: shortening wires, improving stack logic, improving memory semantics, and co-designing chips, packages, software, and clusters,” he said.

Still, challenges remain in thermal management and production at scale, Triolo said.

According to Tingbo He, head of Huawei’s semiconductor business unit, Huawei’s new chip architecture significantly improves power efficiency by expanding the layout from one layer to two.

He, who is also the director of the company’s scientist committee, said in his speech at the International Circuits and Systems Symposium of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers that this structure allows transistors to interact with each other at more points.

But he acknowledged that challenges remain because Huawei has just begun a decade-long development process for the new technology.