After seven years working in the shadows, He Tingbo stepped back into the limelight last month.

The head of Huawei Technologies’ secretive semiconductor business – widely dubbed the company’s “chip queen” – had been out of the public view since 2019, when Washington severed the Chinese company’s global access to advanced technology, including semiconductors.

Her retreat into the background became a symbol of Huawei’s battle for survival. That all changed last month on a global academic stage in Shanghai – the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems.

It was there that He introduced the “Tau (τ) Scaling Law”, which Huawei claimed could achieve transistor densities equivalent to the cutting-edge 1.4-nanometre process by 2031 – all without the need for advanced extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines out of reach due to US sanctions.

The announcement ignited a debate across the global semiconductor industry: Had Huawei truly unlocked a revolutionary chapter for China’s drive towards tech self-reliance, or was it just an ambitious theory, or even hype, destined to stumble when it came to the realities of manufacturing?

Redefining ‘advanced’

For half a century, the electronics industry treated Moore’s Law – the principle that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years – as gospel. But as silicon structures approached atomic limits, geometric scaling was yielding diminishing economic returns and hitting an architectural brick wall.