When He Tingbo assumed responsibility for Huawei’s chip development in 2003, the engineer received an annual allocation of $400 million and a clear charge to build internal semiconductor capability. Over the following two decades, the mandate she accepted evolved into a defining mission for both Huawei and China’s broader technology ambitions.
Today He is president of Huawei’s semiconductor business and serves as director of the company’s Scientist Committee. She also stands out within Huawei’s leadership as one of only two women on the company’s 17-member board, alongside Meng Wanzhou, the founder’s daughter and the firm’s rotating chairwoman. Her profile rose again on Monday after she delivered a keynote titled "New Semiconductor Path in Practice" at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems in Shanghai, a presentation that placed her at the center of debates about how the industry will advance as traditional transistor scaling slows.
For decades, semiconductor performance gains were largely driven by making transistors smaller and fitting more of them on a single chip, a trend commonly referred to as Moore’s Law. As the approach encounters lithographic and atomic limits, however, its effectiveness has diminished, prompting engineers and companies to seek alternative routes to higher performance.
Huawei, the company He helped transform, confronted that challenge earlier than many of its peers. Beginning in 2019, U.S. sanctions restricted Huawei’s access to certain foreign chip technologies and the most advanced manufacturing services. Those constraints threatened Huawei’s products across smartphones and telecommunications equipment and intensified the company’s efforts to develop indigenous semiconductor capabilities.
In her Shanghai address, He outlined Huawei’s alternative framework, described by the company as the Tau Scaling Law. According to Huawei, the law articulates a shift in focus away from further transistor shrinkage and toward accelerating data transmission speeds across devices, circuits, chips and whole computing systems. The company said He’s team has applied this principle for six years and has mass-produced 381 chips based on the approach.
Observers within Huawei trace He’s rise alongside the company’s expansion. Born in 1969 in Changsha, Hunan, she joined the firm in 1996 as an engineer after completing dual bachelor’s degrees in semiconductor physics and communication engineering, and a master’s degree from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. In 2004, Huawei formally established HiSilicon, its chip design arm, which He helped build from a modest internal group into a far-reaching semiconductor operation.
Under her leadership, the unit expanded capabilities across system-on-chip design, optoelectronics and advanced packaging. The scope of work extended across products and computing functions that included smartphones, artificial intelligence, general-purpose processors, telecommunications and networking hardware, and consumer electronics. Huawei said these capabilities played a meaningful role in its 2025 revenue of 880.9 billion yuan, equivalent to $130 billion using the provided exchange convention.
Following the imposition of sanctions, He became closely associated with Huawei’s internal effort to sustain operations. In a widely shared 2019 communication to HiSilicon staff, she described the unit’s work as building "a backup lifeline for Huawei and for the whole country." The language reflects how the company framed semiconductor self-sufficiency amid external constraints.
He’s public promotion of the Tau Scaling Law reinforces Huawei’s pursuit of alternatives to classical scaling as the industry faces physical barriers to continued miniaturization. The company positions this approach as both a technical strategy and a practical response to disrupted supply lines for leading-edge manufacturing. How widely the Tau Scaling Law will be adopted beyond Huawei, and how it will perform across different applications and markets, remains a subject of ongoing industry attention.
Context note: The article does not provide further independent verification of the Tau Scaling Law’s technical details or of performance metrics beyond Huawei’s statement that 381 chips have been mass-produced under the approach. Exchange rate used in the reporting is $1 = 6.7810 Chinese yuan renminbi.