Necessity is the Mother of Invention: Huawei Replaces Moore’s Law With Her’s Law

We now know what China’s been working on to counter U.S. sanctions on EUV technology.

By Sally Ward-Foxton, EE Times | May 27, 2026

At IEEE ISCAS 2026 in Shanghai yesterday (May 26), Huawei president He Tingbo presented China’s answer to U.S. chip manufacturing sanctions, named after her: Her’s Law (Huawei has been writing “He’s Law” rather than “Her’s Law” to encourage the proper pronunciation).

Per He’s presentation, Her’s Law offers a replacement for Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law relies on geometric scaling that is off-limits to Chinese chipmakers and foundries because they are denied access to EUV technology due to U.S. sanctions.

Knowing that necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes, critics of U.S. sanctions feared that restricting access to EUV in 2020 would force China to innovate in other directions. We now know what China’s response to those sanctions looks like—as widely expected, Huawei and SMIC have accelerated other parts of the roadmap to try to compensate for a lack of access to geometry shrinkage.

The upshot is that Huawei wants to reach the equivalent of the rest of the industry’s 14Å node performance by 2031, something Intel expects to achieve by 2027 and TSMC by 2028, placing Huawei about three years behind.

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