He Tingbo, the head of Huawei’s HiSilicon semiconductor division and one of the most consequential figures in China’s chip independence drive, has made a rare and deliberate public appearance, speaking at an industry event and articulating Huawei’s approach to scaling AI chip performance without access to the extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment that remains off-limits to Chinese manufacturers. The emergence of a figure who has operated almost entirely out of public view for years is itself a signal: Huawei is confident enough in its chip progress to put its most sensitive leader in the spotlight.
He Tingbo, sometimes referred to as Huawei’s “chip queen,” has led HiSilicon for more than a decade. Under her leadership, the division developed the Kirin series of mobile processors and, more recently, the Ascend series of AI accelerators that have become the primary domestic alternative to Nvidia’s H100 for Chinese enterprises. When the United States placed Huawei on the Entity List in 2019, He Tingbo wrote an internal letter describing the push as “the most tragic and heroic Long March in the history of science and technology.” She has been out of public view since that year, until last month, when she appeared at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems in Shanghai to introduce the Tau Scaling Law, as reported by the South China Morning Post.
The LogicFolding Framework
He Tingbo’s public remarks centered on Huawei’s LogicFolding approach, a chip architecture strategy that EastFrontier has previously examined in the context of Huawei’s tau scaling law. The core idea is that rather than shrinking transistors, which requires EUV equipment that China cannot access, Huawei is folding circuit layers vertically to increase density and performance. The Tau Scaling Law claims this approach can achieve transistor densities equivalent to a 1.4nm process by 2031. He Tingbo has said her epiphany for the architecture came from studying Dujiangyan, the 2,000-year-old irrigation system in Sichuan province that manages water flow through elegant structural design rather than brute force.
The approach shifts the engineering challenge from lithography to interconnect design and heat management. Shanghai semiconductor research firm ICwise has noted that heat density jumps five to ten times when circuits are folded into multiple active layers, a constraint that Huawei will need to manage as it scales the architecture.
Zhao Chun, a professor at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, has described the LogicFolding framework as “historically significant,” comparing it to Gordon Moore’s 1965 observation about transistor density. Phelix Lee, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar, offered a more measured assessment: LogicFolding bypasses EUV by shifting the engineering burden to reducing data transmission latency between stacked layers, a genuine technical achievement, but one that introduces its own constraints.
He Hui, director of semiconductor research at Omdia, noted that Beijing’s decision to withhold domestic sales approval for Nvidia’s H200 AI processors has created a window for Huawei’s Ascend chips to consolidate their position. “Nvidia is likely the most concerned by this development,” He Hui said. “Having already lost half of its market share in China, Nvidia now faces a reality where domestic chip performance has nearly closed the gap with the H200.”
What Her Emergence Signals
Brady Wang, associate director at Counterpoint Research, cautioned that a significant gap remains between Huawei’s chips and EUV-based systems in terms of power efficiency, performance, speed, and manufacturing throughput. The gap is narrowing, but it has not closed.
He Tingbo’s decision to speak publicly, or Huawei’s decision to allow her to, is nonetheless meaningful. For years, HiSilicon operated as a black box, its progress visible only through the products it shipped and the occasional leak. Ren Zhengfei, Huawei’s founder and CEO, told People’s Daily: “There is actually no need to worry about the chip issue. By using methods like stacking and clustering, our computing performance is comparable to the state-of-the-art level.”
Her appearance at the IEEE symposium, articulating a coherent scaling philosophy, suggests that Huawei now views its chip capabilities as a competitive asset to be communicated rather than a vulnerability to be concealed.
Laila Khawaja of Gavekal Research has argued that Huawei is “presenting foreign governments and companies with a choice: cooperate and share the potential upside from China’s experiment, or risk an alternative Chinese ecosystem.” He Tingbo’s public emergence is consistent with that framing. Huawei is no longer just surviving the chip war. It is beginning to define the terms of the next phase.
The Broader Significance of China’s Chip Independence
He Tingbo’s profile matters beyond Huawei. She is one of the few figures in China’s semiconductor industry who has led a chip design organization from the pre-sanctions era through the full force of US export controls and emerged with a product that is commercially competitive. That experience, and the institutional knowledge embedded in HiSilicon, represents a form of strategic capital that China’s broader chip industry is trying to replicate.
The LogicFolding approach, if it proves scalable, could offer a path for other Chinese chip designers facing the same EUV constraint. China’s semiconductor equipment industry has made progress on deep ultraviolet lithography and is investing heavily in EUV alternatives, but those efforts are years from producing the kind of equipment that TSMC and Samsung use for their most advanced nodes. In the interim, architectural innovation of the kind HiSilicon is pursuing may be the most practical route to performance gains.
For the US export control regime, He Tingbo’s emergence poses a pointed question. The restrictions on EUV equipment and advanced chip manufacturing tools were designed to prevent China from reaching the frontier of semiconductor performance. If Huawei can approach that frontier through a different architectural path, the effectiveness of those controls, and the assumptions underlying them, will need to be reassessed. EastFrontier has previously covered how the US Commerce Department closed the Nvidia AI chip loophole for Chinese firms abroad, a sign that the export control architecture is still being actively refined. He Tingbo’s public return suggests that the target of those controls is adapting faster than the controls themselves.