China's Chip Ambitions Run Into a Global Tech Wall — WSJ

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By Lingling WeiIn 2019, while researching a book on the U.S.-China competition, I visited Huawei's sprawling new R&D campus in Dongguan, a city about an hour's drive from the company's Shenzhen headquarters. The place was something to behold: 300 acres, more than 25,000 employees, and 12 European-style "towns" — Paris, Luxembourg, and others — connected by a miniature train modeled on the Shenzhen metro. A Huawei executive explained the design to me with a straight face: "We're doing well in Europe."The campus told you everything about the company's confidence. In a Wall Street Journal interview that November, founder Ren Zhengfei invited President Trump to come visit and brushed off U.S. sanctions with characteristic bravado. "They may as well keep us there forever," he said, referring to the sanctions. "We'll be fine without them."More than six years later, Huawei is still here — and still projecting confidence. Last week, its semiconductor chief He Tingbo took the stage at a chip conference in Shanghai and announced that Moore's Law had a successor. The principle that chips roughly double in power every two years has been the industry's North Star since the 1960s. He (pronounced "huh"), known as Huawei's "chip queen," called it the Tau Law.But a careful reading of the company's technical paper reveals something rather different from what Huawei intended.The engineering is real. Think of a traditional chip like a single-story building — for decades, the way to pack more onto it was to shrink everything inside. Huawei's technique takes a different approach: instead of building smaller, it builds upward, stacking two layers of circuitry on top of each other so signals travel shorter distances. The company said the approach would make its next chip 55% denser than its predecessor and could deliver cutting-edge performance by 2031."The engineering is genuinely impressive," noted Jimmy Goodrich, an independent semiconductor analyst who reviewed the paper. "The breakthrough framing is not." That's because Huawei, he said, is doing clever things with the tools available to them — and that is the real story.Building upward isn't a new idea — TSMC, Intel, AMD and Samsung are all doing it too. Goodrich said the difference is that all of their designs are stacked atop chips made using a technology called extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV: the manufacturing p...

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