Huawei’s workaround for US chip curbs faces hurdles on road to self-reliance - South China Morning Post

Facing U.S. sanctions that cut off access to advanced lithography machines and EDA tools, Huawei has introduced a novel chip design approach aimed at circumventing bottlenecks imposed by companies lik... Read original →

Huawei’s 'time scaling' workaround is an architectural gambit to offset manufacturing gaps, not a true substitute for EUV. It will catalyze domestic EDA and advanced packaging innovation—especially in Chiplet and silicon photonics—but without sub-3nm nodes from SMIC, its LogicFolding can’t match TSMC or Samsung’s GAA transistor efficiency. U.S. sanctions have already inflated Huawei’s supply chain costs by over 40%, and even a 1.4nm breakthrough at SMIC remains bottlenecked by equipment embargoes. NVIDIA may counter by accelerating Grace-Hopper CPO integration, while ASML lobbies to relax DUV restrictions to preserve China revenue. Over the next 18 months, China’s semiconductor sector will face a widening design-manufacturing gap; without progress in photoresists and etch tools, architecture-only workarounds will hit fundamental physics walls.