When He took the stage at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems in Shanghai in May, it marked her first major public appearance since 2019, when Washington cut Huawei off from key semiconductor technologies.

The veteran executive used the occasion to unveil the Tau Scaling Law, a framework Huawei says could help advance chip performance without relying on the most advanced extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines that remain beyond China's reach because of U.S. export controls. Huawei claims the approach could eventually achieve transistor densities equivalent to a 1.4-nanometer process by 2031.

If successful, the breakthrough would challenge the industry's long-held assumption that EUV lithography machines made by Dutch company ASML are essential for producing chips at 5 nanometers and below. Such advanced semiconductors are used in artificial intelligence systems and other high-performance computing applications, Bloomberg noted.

Nanometers are commonly used to describe semiconductor manufacturing processes. Smaller process nodes generally allow more transistors to be packed onto a chip, improving performance and energy efficiency. Today, leading chipmakers such as TSMC, Samsung and Intel rely on ASML's EUV machines to manufacture their most advanced semiconductors.

Huawei said it has developed 381 chips for telecommunications, smartphones, general computing and AI applications over the past six years using principles behind the Tau Scaling Law. He described the technology as a breakthrough in Huawei's fundamental technology research with implications beyond the company itself.

"No single company can have all the answers in the next decade. We welcome like-minded partners from academia and industry to join us in tackling the common challenges facing the electronics sector and exploring a path forward together," she told Xinhua News Agency.

He Tingbo, Huawei's President of the Semiconductor Business Dept. Photo courtesy of Huawei

Building chip empire

Born in 1969 in Changsha, Hunan province, He joined Huawei in 1996 after earning dual bachelor's degrees in semiconductor physics and communications engineering and a master's degree from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

She began her career designing optical communications chips at Huawei's headquarters in Shenzhen before moving to Shanghai in 1998 to help build the company's wireless chip team and develop 3G technologies. A turning point came in 2003 when Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei placed her in charge of chip development with an annual budget of $400 million and a mandate to reduce dependence on foreign suppliers.

The following year, Huawei established HiSilicon, its chip design subsidiary. Under He's leadership, the operation expanded from a small internal unit into one of the world's broadest semiconductor businesses. Over the next two decades, the company developed capabilities in system-on-chip design, optoelectronics, advanced packaging, artificial intelligence processors, telecommunications chips, networking equipment and consumer electronics.

Reuters reported that the semiconductor business became an important contributor to Huawei's 2025 revenue of 880.9 billion yuan ($130 billion).

Today, He serves as president of Huawei's semiconductor business, director of the Huawei Scientist Committee and one of only two women on Huawei's 17-member board, alongside Meng Wanzhou, the company's rotating chairwoman and daughter of Ren.

The defining challenge of He's career emerged in 2019 when the U.S. placed Huawei on its Entity List, restricting the company's access to advanced semiconductors and chipmaking technologies. The move threatened Huawei's smartphone, telecommunications and networking businesses and forced the company to rethink its long-term technology strategy.

In an internal letter to employees that year, He revealed that Huawei had spent years preparing backup chip plans, commonly known as its "spare tire" strategy, according to the South China Morning Post.

For decades, semiconductor development was guided by Moore's Law, which predicts that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years. As transistor sizes approach physical limits, however, further gains have become increasingly difficult and costly.

Huawei believes the industry needs a different path. Named after the Greek letter "tau," the Tau Scaling Law focuses on reducing delays in data transmission across devices, circuits, chips and computing systems rather than relying solely on shrinking transistor sizes.

The Tau Scaling Law offers a different answer, He told Global Times. The industry must look not only at space but also at time, examining every level from transistors and circuits to chips and data centers to reduce transmission delays, synchronization time and computing latency, she said.

He compared the concept to transforming a flat city into a three-dimensional city connected by millions of elevators. Logic folding, she said, is not simply about stacking layers but restructuring information pathways so an entire system can complete tasks faster.

From dead end to highway

Reflecting on the years following the sanctions, He said she went through a period of frustration when she felt there was "no way out." The turning point came from an unlikely source: Dujiangyan, a 2,000-year-old irrigation system in Sichuan province built without electricity or modern machinery.

Rather than viewing sanctions as an insurmountable obstacle, she began to see them as engineering challenges that could be solved. That thinking helped shape Huawei's response.

In 2023, the company surprised the industry with the launch of the Mate 60 Pro smartphone powered by the 5G-capable Kirin 9000S processor. A teardown by Canadian research firm TechInsights found that Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation had produced the chip using a 7-nanometer process and existing manufacturing equipment pushed close to their limits.

Huawei has since become more open about its semiconductor ambitions. "There is actually no need to worry about the chip issue," Ren told People's Daily last year. "By using methods like stacking and clustering, [our] computing performance is comparable to the state-of-the-art level." The company's Ascend AI processors have also emerged as domestic alternatives to products from U.S. chip giant Nvidia.

Huawei's growing confidence has extended beyond its technical teams.

"If it weren't for the U.S. forcing our country, company and industry, we would never have taken on a task like this," Xu Zhijun, Huawei's rotating chairman, said following the Tau Scaling Law announcement. "We have the U.S. to thank for enabling our nation's semiconductor supply chain to truly grow and develop."

Huawei plans to release a new high-end Kirin processor this autumn that will be the first commercial chip to fully implement logic folding technology. He said the design compresses multiple logic pathways, allowing data to travel through shorter and denser connections inside the chip.

"This year we have prepared a surprise for the whole industry. Not saturation, not continuation, but a big leap ahead," she said.

Whether Huawei's approach can ultimately narrow the gap with global leaders such as TSMC, Samsung and Intel remains uncertain. But for the team He has led through years of sanctions and technological restrictions, the backup plans once designed as a safeguard have evolved into a long-term strategy.

"We not only opened up the road, but also built a highway," He said.