Huawei says it wants to reach a lithography process comparable to TSMC’s 1.4nm class by 2031, a bold target for a company still operating under U.S. sanctions that cut it off from the most advanced chipmaking tools. At the same time, Huawei is pushing a new ”LogicFolding Design” aimed at packing in more transistors while improving energy efficiency, with future Kirin processors set to be the first commercial chips built on it.
The announcement came at the IEEE ISCAS 2026 conference in Shanghai, where Huawei’s semiconductor chief outlined the company’s latest chip ambitions. The pitch is easy to understand: if foreign equipment is off-limits, build a domestic path anyway. The hard part, of course, is that semiconductor roadmaps are full of brave promises and very expensive reality checks.
LogicFolding Design and Kirin chips
Huawei says LogicFolding Design is meant to raise transistor density and improve power efficiency, two metrics that decide whether a chip is merely impressive on paper or actually useful in phones. The company also said its next-generation Kirin mobile processors will be the first commercial chips to use the architecture.
- Goal: higher transistor density
- Goal: better energy efficiency
- First commercial users: next-generation Kirin processors
A domestic EUV route is the obvious bet
With ASML’s EUV systems unavailable to Huawei because of U.S. restrictions, China’s SiCarrier is the most likely fallback. SiCarrier has been positioning itself as a homegrown alternative to ASML’s most advanced equipment, and Huawei may already be backing that effort through investment, although that has not been confirmed. In a market where every extra layer of tool access matters, the supplier chain is the real battleground.
The timeline is ambitious enough to raise eyebrows. TSMC and Samsung are still pushing deeper into advanced nodes with huge capital budgets and mature supply ecosystems, while Huawei has to build around limitations that its rivals do not face. That makes 2031 less a neat forecast than a stress test for China’s chipmaking ambitions.
Huawei’s 2031 chip target will be tested in public
The company reportedly sought $2.8 billion in funding in the first half of 2025, which gives a sense of how expensive this path is likely to be. Even if the money arrives, chipmaking progress depends on lithography, manufacturing yields, materials, and a long list of small disasters that do not show up in a keynote slide.
If Huawei keeps advancing at this pace, the interesting question is not whether it can make a loud announcement. It is whether it can turn a sanctions-era workaround into a production process that actually ships at scale before the decade is out.