Riding the wind of rebirth

Chapter 1293 Working together for a win-win situation

Project 908 is a detour the country has taken in the large-scale integrated circuit chip manufacturing industry.

Because they did not realize that the chip manufacturing industry is a highly interconnected industry that integrates process matching, chip design, wafer production, chip manufacturing, downstream industry needs, etc., the deployment of this project went off track from the beginning.

It was originally ambitious and focused on the goal of catching up with the world's chip industry. However, when several production lines were introduced, we realized that just having a pot was not enough.

There are no chefs, no recipes, and the most important thing is that there are no diners, and no one else even wants to provide OEM work.

What's even more tragic is that the leakage in the house was caused by the continuous rain. Because it took too long to cross the river by feeling for the stones, it took too long from introduction to production. As a result, it happened to catch up with the information industry that suddenly gathered from quantitative changes to qualitative changes, and the iteration of large-scale integrated circuits suddenly It started to change from linear stacking to exponential stacking, which caused the production line to fall behind from the day it was put into production. And then it has been delayed until now, and it still has no rice to cook, and it is running several generations behind.

The grand plan to incubate industries with production capacity has almost gone bankrupt.

The solution sent by Zhou Zhi is almost the last chance to save this project. If we can't grasp it, then these production lines will be introduced in vain.

Although the current production is still lagging behind, the design and production requirements of audio decoding chips and digital-to-analog conversion chips do not require the world's top technologies. The current production lines just meet the design requirements.

The important thing is that the thoughtful plan is an ultimate solution, forming a whole industry chain from chip design and production to downstream engineering product design and production.

This is no longer about creating a chip and then shelving it on the shelf after being praised for its achievements, but about putting it on the market to make money.

Of course, we must pool all our resources and go all out.

Even so, courage and investment alone are not enough. Fortunately, Zhou Zhi, with the experience of later generations, knows the general trend of industrial development and has been firmly following his own path.

The underlying instruction set of Clover Company has been developed, and the MP3 protocol and Microsoft WMP protocol have been obtained, and the demand solution has been designed in advance, and all are based on the ISO9000 certification framework.

All of these have saved a huge amount of time for the timely release of technical proposals for decoding chips and digital-to-analog conversion chips.

And because of the existence of the underlying instruction set, both chips have completely abandoned the traditional design concept of "treating headaches, treating headaches and treating pains," and focus on a superposition architecture of a basic instruction layer-standard application layer-featured application layer, which also provides In the future, independent upgrade iterations of the three software design layers will lay a foundation for operation.

The benefits of this are self-evident. For example, if we face different needs from different player manufacturers in the future, the basic command layer and standard application layer will basically not need to be touched, and only the programs of the featured application layer will need to be modified.

If you need to design other streaming media decoding chips in the future, such as LD, DVD, and the upcoming VCD decoding chip, the basic instruction layer can still be retained, and you only need to redesign the upper two layers, which can also save a lot of energy.

In the future, Clover Company will use a huge proportion of investment to focus on the research and development of basic instructions and general platform operating systems. As for the two layers above, once it has the strength, it can spread hero posts, or invite tenders, or Outsourcing, or mergers and acquisitions, will eventually form a set of cross-platform operating systems with independent intellectual property rights.

This is also the growth model commonly used by mainstream large information technology companies today. Today's human resource costs and hardware cost investment are still relatively low. If you allow this kind of "burning money", it's still too late to seize the time. If you really wait until ten or twenty years later to develop, you will really need to pay a huge price. As long as Together with the few remaining giants in the world, it will be a competition to see who can burn more money.

Just a few years ago, China was able to provide foundry chips to island countries, which shows that it is not far behind. Zhou Zhi’s plan is a new approach, using leading design concepts to make up for the relative backwardness of the production line, starting with LINUX. On the basis of this, we started by developing a set of basic instruction sets with independent intellectual property rights.

This is a big job. Fortunately, the salary of domestic software engineers is not high, and Clover's profit is enough to afford it.

Although this job is still inconspicuous now, in the future it will become a stepping stone for Clover Company to participate in the competition in the world's information industry.

This is like Apple's IOS arm instruction set; Intel's x86 instruction set is the core competitiveness of information industry companies.

If COS and MiniCOS can really become a large pond that supports the domestic software industry ecology in the future, and can become a cross-platform fully IoT ecological operating system that can surpass IOS and WINDOWS, then its main value will far exceed the system itself, but come from At "Cyber ​​Bazaar".

There is no need to occupy the whole world, but it only needs to capture the huge Chinese market of more than one billion people, almost everyone has a mobile phone, and even babies have communication watches. Clover Company can eat this stall with just a "market management fee" " is enough to receive mercy.

Producing audio decoding chips and digital-to-analog rendering chips based on basic instruction set architecture is only the first piece in this big game. It is also after Clover Company has completed multi-party integration and development and gained considerable research and development experience. This was the first step he took cautiously.

Finding a reliable collaborator like Hua Hong is a win-win situation, and no one loses.

"Let's listen to the effect." Xu Wangting pressed the play button on a bare machine on the table: "Another benefit of the instruction set platform is that audio files can be stored in the form of directory tree folders, and the read instructions belong to the MiniCOS platform , the retrieval is efficient and fast, and the performance is mature.”

"Because it uses the existing technological achievements of Clover Company, the transformation is very fast, saving half of our energy."

The requirement in the demand specification is that the size of the player should not exceed the size of a deck of playing cards. Due to limitations of battery power and memory stick storage space, the design requires that it be replaceable. The rest of the functions are almost the same as those of later generations of portable MP3 players. almost.

Because of its in-depth cooperation with Microsoft, this machine also has a cool function, that is, it can be recognized by the Microsoft operating system as an external device, allowing free drag-and-drop copying.

Zhou Zhi also requested that this player come with a better function, which is a transcoding compressor installed on the computer. The software name is called "Format Factory", which can convert CD music into MP3 format or WMA, MPEG and other formats, and also Ability to freely select compression ratio.

One advantage of this is that it is frugal. For example, the standard 64M memory stick can only store up to two pieces of music with lossless sound quality, but if you choose twelve times the standard MP3 compression ratio, it can store twenty-four pieces of music. head.

Of course, the premise is that you can tolerate the loss of sound quality caused by this compression.

(End of this chapter)