The Chip Insider®–Huawei’s Strategic Assault on Moore’s Law

Huawei promotes advanced packaging as a path beyond Moore’s Law, highlighting scaling limits while raising questions around EDA capabilities and thermal challenges.

Huawei’s Strategic Assault on Moore’s Law: As you know, Huawei created a new media storm this week with He Tingbo’s keynote… given in English … was laying down the gauntlet in an open challenge of the west… the impression … from the CRAD social influencer fan club (China Rules, America Drools) that loves to play up every advance out of China as a new assassin’s mace (杀手锏)… HiSilicon has two interacting assassin’s maces: "Tau (τ) Scaling Law" and “He’s Law.” In fact, there’s little new here... Nvidia’s Jensen Huang told … this is a polite way of saying Huawei has just learned Electrical Engineering and now wants to teach the world…In EE terms that means He sees … To borrow from the movie, Top Gun, He “feels the need for speed.” But so does everyone else in AI… her basic point is that there’s more to speed than shrinking transistors, which… Shrinking transistors has two speed effects and both are distance related … Anyone who’s spent time in the western part of America can see this: Single ranches were turned into suburban homes on quarter acre lots, which were then shrunk down to smaller lots, to duplexes, to fourplexes, and eventually to multi-story apartment complexes. In semiconductor technology, Moore’s Law pretty much stopped before multi-story buildings, which we now sell as HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) and … What’s new here is that HiSilicon has simply rebranded advanced packaging as LogicFolding. Even putting logic chips on top of each other is not new. IBM… imec … CMOS 2.0 paradigm. These ideas have been around for five decades with little traction due to cost and thermal issues. The “known unknowns” of Huawei’s Strategic Assault on Moore’s Law: The biggest unknown I see here is the degree to which China’s EDA companies have advanced … China’s advantage over the west is … The bottom line is that China’s EDA industry could be a major disruptive force… Another known unknown is how good their EDA tools are at overcoming the technical challenges of designing in a LogicFolding environment…. Question is, how are they dealing with thermal issues… Either way, semiconductors are the Afghanistan of tech: they are a graveyard of empires. “There are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns” – Donald Rumsfeld