Qualcomm announced today that it is officially licensing technology from Chinese technology giant Huawei. In a deal estimated to be worth $6.9 billion upon completion, Qualcomm will license various technologies from Huawei to integrate across its product portfolio. According to official releases, these technologies include computing, AI, networking, and more.
Bloomberg reports that the deal also covers Huawei's latest LogicFolding silicon design. This is a significant win for Huawei, whose R&D teams have spent years designing a way to bypass sanctions and overcome manufacturing technology limits. By stacking silicon vertically across two sheets, LogicFolding dramatically reduces the distance between compute elements, increases efficiency, and significantly improves transistor density.
The result is a 55% increase in transistor density and a 41% boost in power efficiency. Since Huawei lacks access to manufacturing its silicon using EUV lithography, it uses DUV machines with LogicFolding to work around this limitation. Even so, the company claims that LogicFolding on its domestic node production will achieve a transistor density equivalent to a 1.4 nm node by 2031.
For Qualcomm, whose access to advanced lithography is unrestricted, this means the company can potentially surpass Moore's Law by stacking multiple sheets of cutting-edge silicon, achieving massive boosts in transistor density and power efficiency.
Source: TechPowerUp News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing