Riding the wind of rebirth

Chapter 1704 The Meaning of Success

This success was revolutionary and brought great benefits to all participants.

Clover has gained the ability to independently develop EDA and ASIC, which are two chip design software. With them, China will have the chip design capability based on independent intellectual property rights, and others will not be able to strangle it.

The improved mask design files on this basis enable domestic wafers to participate in the high-end memory chip manufacturing industry. The expansion of production capacity has solved two bottlenecks - one is the problem of the outlet of domestic wafers; the other is the problem of tight supply of two major types of memory chips.

Compared with these two issues, changing the supply of memory chips, structurally reducing the production costs of memory chips, and allowing more people to afford high-capacity storage devices have even become secondary issues.

The chip industry is truly a high value-added industry that can turn stones into gold. The explosive production capacity has allowed Huahong and Clover to surpass Panasonic in one fell swoop, becoming the third and fourth largest memory chip suppliers in the world.

Clover had a ready-made production line and immediately transformed the chip into a memory stick, adding storage functions to many electronic products.

The first to benefit are audio and video electronic products such as electronic music players, video recorders, and cameras. The relatively cheap storage space makes the digitization of these devices possible.

The second is the information processing industry and the electronic game industry. Compared with CDs, the data on memory sticks can be modified and saved, which has great advantages in the electronic game industry.

At the same time, large-capacity memory and cache can also greatly improve the interactivity of data processing and the smoothness of the game. Sony, which has deep cooperation with Clover, immediately replaced many of its games with 3D character and environment rendering files without changing the core of the game. The old core plus three-dimensional character modeling and moving light and shadow effects alone made the game sales hot again.

Another ridiculous thing that happened during this revolution was the refinement and simplification of the AV industry.

All kinds of people try their best to make their company's videos short and concise, so that they can fit a whole film into a 500-megabyte data card, which can be easily viewed by plugging it into a computer via a USB port or a player port with USB data processing function.

Listening to the two old perverts from Japan and South Korea vividly discussing the benefits that the price reduction of memory cards would bring to perverts, Zhou Zhi just felt that this world was really ridiculous and it was driving him crazy.

But if you think about it, it's not a big problem, because whenever any new technology comes out, the first thing people think of is to use it in military applications, and the second thing is to use it to enhance sensory stimulation, with almost no exceptions.

So it is not the high-capacity storage devices that make the perverts physically weak, but their bad nature that causes their bodies to become weak. The devices are at most accomplices.

In fact, the success of the Zhangjiang Memory Chip Industrial Base is a real victory in the industrial sense, because it solves one of the biggest problems of the domestic chip industry - the market.

An industry without a market is useless no matter how much it is praised.

  People in later generations often lament that the country missed out on industrial opportunities, which led to being strangled by others in the later period. They also lament that many entrepreneurs were short-sighted, causing their companies to become assembly plants and OEM factories. However, they seldom think about a question: under the current industrial background, can China's own chip industry find a market large enough to support itself?

Without a market, there will be no profits and no opportunities to grow. Just like Zhangjiang’s previous grand 809 project, after billions of dollars were burned, nothing was left.

At present, China is not absolutely backward in terms of scientific research talents, industrial inclination, and technical conditions, but it simply cannot find the corresponding market. Where is the market for information technology chips? It is not with ordinary consumers, but with information technology equipment manufacturers.

Information technology equipment manufacturers don't use your chips. The chips you produce are no different from their original state - sand.

Where is the market for IT equipment manufacturers? Again, it is not with ordinary consumers, but with software engineering manufacturers, first of all operating systems, and then application software.

Therefore, this market itself is a big sandwich cake with protocols, chips, devices, operating systems and application software nested in layers. If you want to develop this relatively independent market in China, it is useless to just develop chips.

It must be an all-round development from bottom to top, so that each level can find industrial support and market outlets for itself and ensure that it will not starve to death.

As long as any one of the links requires a large amount of imports, the entire system will not be able to get rid of its dependence on imports. The end result is that when others want to strangle you, you will still be strangled.

To give a simple example, take the operating system. If you don’t have your own operating system, you can only use someone else’s operating system. Someone else’s operating system has a series of low-level instructions. These low-level instructions are responsible for information interaction between application software and information processing devices.

Therefore, the information processing equipment must be able to understand and calculate the information sent by the operating system, and the chips used must be designed based on this instruction set. Therefore, chip production itself serves the operating system instruction set. Even if you have the ability to independently produce chips, you still have to rely on the protocol framework discussed and designed by others, and you still have to provide reliable support for the storage and operation of the operating system. As long as you want to eat and finish your meal within this system, you are still a Monkey King and cannot jump out of the Five Finger Mountain of Tathagata Buddha.

So, apart from succumbing to this system, is there any way we can go our own way?

The answer is yes. Zhou Zhi is now leading Clover Company, moving forward step by step.

Although we started late, we can still take advantage of some opportunities, because there are still many loopholes to be found in the world's big bag of information technology intellectual property.

These so-called "big leaks" are open source protocols and open source software.

These open source protocols and open source software are generally very primitive and useless in terms of functions, but they are complete in terms of architectural systems, and sometimes even redundant.

The most important thing is that these protocols and software do not have any intellectual property barriers, so they can be taken for further research and development, which saves a lot of effort compared to developing such protocols and software entirely on your own.

With this set of things, we have a basic platform that connects the upper and lower parts, and we can develop application software above the platform and supporting chips below the platform.

Of course, this is only feasible in theory. The real operating system is huge and complex, and even Clover currently lacks such capabilities.