Riding the wind of rebirth

Today's chip development is far from being "stuck", but it is slow and slow. From the initial imbalance of the industry to the later heavy dependence, it itself has to go through a process.

The origins of the chip industry can be traced back to the early 20s, when the technology was still microtubes.

In the 1960s, technology entered the era of MOS transistors, and its emergence became one of the foundations for the advent of the chip era.

Over the next decade, as transistor technology continued to improve and develop, more and more transistors were incorporated into a single chip, which is what we call an integrated circuit chip. At this time, the development ideas of chips began to be qualitative. After that, humans began to continuously improve the process and combined semiconductor technology and microelectronics technology, emphasizing the characteristics of small size, good packaging integrity, and high reliability. At this point, the chip entered the era of integrated circuits.

From 1975 until now, with the continuous development and improvement of integrated circuit technology, more and more transistors have been incorporated into the same integrated circuit chip, so large-scale integrated circuit chips, or LSI for short, have appeared.

Large-scale integrated circuit chips have a larger capacity than integrated circuit chips and can realize more complex combinations of electronic components and circuits. At the same time, the chip has also been applied to fields such as computers, communications, military industry, and medical care, pushing the level of human science and technology to a new level. new heights.

The next two years will be a critical period for the chip industry. With the further expansion of chips, starting in 1995, the industry will enter the era of very large-scale integrated circuit chips, or VLSI.

This is when China began to fall behind.

In the era of VLSI chips, chip design and production have become more and more specialized and diversified. The software and hardware tools required for chip design have also been continuously updated and upgraded, such as EDA tools, very large-scale integrated circuits and ASIC design, all of which have been introduced into the industry.

At the same time, in the production of VLSI chips, semiconductor wafer manufacturing, photolithography technology, chemical etching and other processes have also been developed and improved accordingly, which has greatly improved the manufacturing cost, manufacturing cycle and production efficiency of the chip. .

These developments involve limitations in two aspects. One is technology, but even more important than technology is the market.

This is a very money-burning industry. If there is only input but no output, it will end up like the last time the 908 Project failed.

But conversely, it will not work to only focus on the market but not on R&D, resulting in dependence on foreign products. The harm can't be seen yet, but as a man of two generations, Zhou Zhi is very aware of the pros and cons involved.

Therefore, it is very difficult to find an opportunity to invest while also harvesting output value, converting products into commodities that can be sold, and ultimately turning manufacturing profits.

At least in the current period, it is even more difficult than craft construction and technology introduction.

When the first-generation transistor chip came out in the 1950s, its size was still on the millimeter level; in the 1960s, the size of the second-generation chip was reduced to the micron level; in the 1970s, when the third-generation chip appeared, its size was reduced to the sub-micron level. .

In the 90s, in 1990, IBM invented a new method of manufacturing nanoscale chips called scanning tunneling microscopy, or STM.

This method can manufacture chips at the atomic level, reducing the size of the chip to the nanometer level, which also marks the beginning of nanoscale chips entering the laboratory research stage.

According to the process steps of the previous life, it took until 2000 for Intel to launch the first 90-nanometer chip. Nano-scale chips began to enter the commercialization stage and entered the "nano era." This is the core technology ten years from now, but now, the Pentium P5 chip, which has just become mainstream, has only three million transistors, a main frequency of 60M Hz, and a manufacturing process of 800 nanometers.

This chip is called a "submicron" chip.

Even if the 908 project in China has failed, the 1.2-inch chip production line with a monthly output of 6 pieces has been put into production, and its manufacturing process is as large as 1 micron.

In other words, the current gap between China and the world is actually not that big. The gap does not lie in the hardware technology of production, but in software such as EDA tools, very large scale integrated circuits and ASIC design.

There is also the app market.

To put it in a simple sentence, as long as the country can design excellent chips, it does not mean that it does not have the ability to manufacture them. This situation is exactly the opposite of the era that later generations passed through.

Similarly, it is precisely because the gap is not big that there is still time to catch up. At the same time, it is also because the gap is so small that "blocking" and "stuck" are meaningless now.

This is why Zhou Zhi is confident in winning cooperation between Japan and South Korea.

Of course, if you don't want to give up your child, you can't beat the wolf. No one in this world is a real fool. If you want to cooperate, Clover must exchange some current interests to show your sincerity in cooperation.

So far, there are very few things that Clover can handle with large foreign companies. It almost only has the company's core thing - the MiniCOS universal platform instruction set.

How to maximize the effectiveness of existing things is a thoughtful matter.

"Our company's positioning for itself is to continue to work hard in the field of software and hardware communication and operating systems." Zhou Zhi said: "To be precise, the design and production of the two chips this time is just the company's opportunity to develop in its own field. In 'Lower Inclusion Collection', we just did a little business expansion."

"Of course we hope that this kind of thing can continue, but we also clearly know that it is too difficult to continue to develop based on our own capabilities and business scope." Zhou Zhi said with sincerity: "Under such circumstances, the introduction of A strategic partner is inevitable."

"Since all of us have the intention or need to cooperate, we have the basis for negotiation." Zhou Zhi pointed out three fingers: "I will now be frank and put forward what Clover Company wants: in the near future, it is Introduce a NAND flash storage chip production line and jointly manufacture memory sticks with your company; in the medium term, we will control the DVD production technology of MPEG-2. We welcome your company to adopt our standards and jointly build a factory to manufacture decoding chips; in the long term, we will We work together to formulate international factory automation control equipment standards and develop digital controllers and distributed digital control systems based on these standards."

"Well..." Matsui Zuo and Jin Chunyi couldn't help but fell into deep thought.

It should be said that these three items proposed by Zhou Zhi are all difficult, but the scales are also very precise.