More than 60 years ago, the chemist Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors that could fit on a chip would double every two years. He was right. Computing power increased for decades and costs fell. But many smartphones, computers, and an era of artificial intelligence later, Moore’s Law has reached its limits. That’s where He Tingbo (China, 1969), president of Huawei’s semiconductor business, comes in. She has proposed an alternative law to ensure that chips continue to gain power and efficiency without the need to keep shrinking the transistor.
The new method, announced on May 25 at a conference titled “New Semiconductor Path in Practice,” is called the Tau scaling law. It proposes trading size for time: instead of continuing to reduce the size of the transistor—the industry currently manufactures at nodes of just a few nanometers, a technically challenging and extremely costly process—it proposes cutting the time it takes for the electrical signal to travel between the chip’s components. It does this using a technique called LogicFolding, which involves stacking circuits vertically, in layers, rather than spreading them out on a single plane.
He Tingbo stated that her team has been using the method for six years and has mass-produced 381 chips using it. The Kirin 2026, expected to launch this fall, could be the first in the world to feature this technology. The reaction has been a mix of enthusiasm and skepticism. Several analysts acknowledge that Tau’s law is the most coherent theoretical framework offered so far for the post-Moore era. But stacking computing in three dimensions is not new—other companies have been doing it for years—and experts warn that more layers also mean more heat, poorer manufacturing yields, and higher costs. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said it was a major breakthrough for Huawei, but maintained that it does not threaten TSMC.
Huawei was one of the first major companies forced to seek alternatives to Moore’s Law. In 2019, during his first term, Donald Trump added the company to the U.S. trade blacklist. Washington did not manufacture its own chips, but it controlled the design software and equipment without which no one could produce them. The company’s response was to focus on self-sufficiency and invest a massive portion of its resources in R&D (more than 192 billion yuan in 2025, 22% of its revenue). So much so that one of its rotating chairmen, Xu Zhijun, has even thanked the U.S. for the pressure: “If they hadn’t forced us, we wouldn’t have done something like this.”
He has become China’s key asset in weathering U.S. sanctions and building an independent semiconductor industry. In addition to heading Huawei’s semiconductor business, she chairs its scientific committee and is one of only two women on the company’s 17-member board, alongside Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of founder Ren Zhengfei.
He Tingbo grew up in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, in the Dongtang area. She attended Huangtuling Primary School, a prestigious institution in the city, for both elementary and middle school. She studied at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, which she entered after graduating from high school with excellent grades. There she completed her entire higher education: a double bachelor’s degree in Semiconductor Physics and Communications Engineering, followed by a master’s degree in Semiconductor Devices and Physics.
She joined Huawei in 1996 and has been with the company ever since. She started as an engineer, working on the design of optical communication chips at the company’s headquarters in Shenzhen. In 1998, she moved to Shanghai to build a wireless chip team from the ground up and focus on the development of 3G chips.
The turning point came in 2003: Zhengfei put her in charge of chip development with an annual budget of $400 million and a mandate to reduce reliance on foreign suppliers. The following year, Huawei formally established HiSilicon as its semiconductor subsidiary, of which she eventually became president. Under her leadership, HiSilicon evolved from a small internal department into the brainpower behind nearly everything Huawei sells. Her team designed the Kirin processors that power the brand’s phones, the Ascend chips with which the company is taking on Nvidia in artificial intelligence within China, the Kunpeng processors for servers, and the semiconductors that govern 5G networks and antennas.
Before the sanctions, that business was among the largest in the world. But in 2020, the United States barred any factory using American technology—including TSMC—from producing its chips, and the company it had spent 15 years building suddenly lost its manufacturing base: its revenue plummeted by 81% in a single year. It managed a partial comeback in 2023, when it made a surprise reappearance with a phone powered by its own in-house-manufactured chip, though its technology still lagged behind the leaders.
Tau’s strategy is, at its core, the ultimate response to the setback of 2019: if you can’t make smaller parts because you lack the machinery, stop competing on size and start competing on speed. It’s a way to keep moving forward by circumventing the only bottleneck that nearly brought the company to its knees.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition
