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 US 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. US 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 US 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.

Building a "backup lifeline" for the whole country

He's career has largely tracked Huawei's global rise, its years of struggle following US sanctions, and then a rebirth as the core driver of China's mission to become a high-tech juggernaut.

Born in 1969 in Changsha in the southern province of Hunan, she joined Huawei in 1996 as an engineer after earning a dual bachelor's degree in semiconductor physics and communication engineering and also a master's degree from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

In 2004, the company formally established HiSilicon, its chip design unit, which He helped build from a small internal department into one of the world's broadest semiconductor operations.

Under her leadership, Huawei developed capabilities across system-on-chip design, optoelectronics, and advanced packaging.

The portfolio eventually spanned smartphones, artificial intelligence, general-purpose processors, telecommunications, networking and consumer electronics, playing a significant part in Huawei's 2025 revenue of 880.9 billion yuan ($130 billion).

After sanctions hit, He became closely associated with Huawei's internal survival effort. In a widely circulated 2019 letter to HiSilicon employees, she said the unit was "building a backup lifeline for Huawei and for the whole country."

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