Huawei's 'chip queen' He Tingbo unveils Tau Scaling Law to bypass US sanctions

He Tingbo, head of Huawei Technologies' secretive semiconductor business and known as the company's 'chip queen', reemerged from a five-year public absence at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems in Shanghai last month. She introduced the 'Tau (τ) Scaling Law', which Huawei claims can achieve transistor densities equivalent to the 1.4-nanometre process by 2031 without requiring advanced extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, which are inaccessible due to US sanctions. He had retreated from public view in 2019 after Washington severed Huawei's global access to advanced technology, including semiconductors. Her epiphany, she says, came from an ancient irrigation system in Sichuan province built without modern machinery or electricity. The announcement challenges Moore's Law, which has guided the electronics industry for half a century but now faces diminishing returns as silicon structures approach atomic limits.