Huawei’s ‘chip queen’ etches her name in China’s tech folklore
When He Tingbo was put in charge of Huawei’s chip development in 2003, the young engineer was handed an annual budget of $400 million and a mandate that would eventually put her at the centre of China’s most consequential technology effort.
More than two decades later, He, often described in Chinese technology circles as Huawei’s “chip queen”, has become one of the company’s most important executives and a symbol of China’s determination to survive U.S. sanctions and build a self-reliant semiconductor business.
He is president of Huawei’s semiconductor business and director of its Scientist Committee. She is also one of only two women on Huawei’s 17-member board, alongside Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of founder Ren Zhengfei and Huawei’s rotating chairwoman.
Her latest public appearance on Monday, a keynote address titled “New Semiconductor Path in Practice” at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems in Shanghai, places her at the centre of a global debate over what comes after Moore’s Law.
For decades, chip progress was driven by shrinking transistors and packing more of them onto a single chip, making computers faster, cheaper and more energy efficient, a pattern known as Moore’s Law. But as semiconductor scaling approaches lithographic and atomic limits, Moore’s Law has become less effective, forcing the industry to find new ways to boost performance.
For Huawei, that challenge arrived earlier and more brutally than for many rivals. U.S. sanctions beginning in 2019 cut the company off key foreign chip technologies and leading-edge manufacturing, threatening its businesses from smartphones to telecommunications equipment.
New U.S. curbs subsequently put many of Huawei’s domestic partners and competitors in a similar predicament, increasing the importance of post-Moore’s Law semiconductor technologies.
He introduced on Monday what Huawei calls the Tau Scaling Law, a principle the Chinese technology company says can guide chip development as Moore’s Law weakens.
Huawei said her team has spent the past six years applying it and has mass-produced 381 chips based on the approach.
The principle argues that the semiconductor industry should shift its focus from shrinking transistors to speeding up transmission speeds across devices, circuits, chips and computing systems.
