Chapter 1295: Working together for a win-win situation
The 908 project is a detour the country has taken in the large-scale integrated circuit chip manufacturing industry.
Because we did not realize that the chip manufacturing industry is an industry with strong comprehensive correlations such as process matching, chip design, wafer production, chip manufacturing, and downstream industry needs, the deployment of this project went off track from the very beginning. .
Originally, we were very ambitious and focused on the goal of catching up with the forefront of the world's chip industry. But when several production lines were introduced, we realized that just having pots was not enough.
There is no chef, 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 of incubating 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 it is lagging behind when it comes to production now, the design requirements and production requirements of audio decoding chips and digital-to-analog conversion chips do not require the world's top technology. The current production lines just meet the design requirements.
The important thing is that the thoughtful plan is an ultimate solution, from the design and production of chips to the design and production of downstream engineering products, forming a whole industry chain.
This is no longer about creating a chip and then putting it on the shelf after being praised for its achievements, but about putting it on the market to make money.
Of course we must concentrate all 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.
Clover Company's underlying instruction set 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 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 the different needs of different player manufacturers in the future, the basic command layer and standard application layer will basically not need to be touched, and only the special application layer will need to be modified. program on it.
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. You only need to redesign the upper two layers, which can also save money. 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, and the two layers above it will be able to spread heroes after they have the strength. Posting, bidding, outsourcing, or mergers and acquisitions, eventually forming 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, indicating that it was 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. , start by developing a basic instruction set with independent intellectual property rights based on LINUX.
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".
You don’t need to occupy the whole world, but you only need 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 market. Just a "market management fee" is enough to attract mercy.
The production of audio decoding chips and digital-analog rendering chips based on the basic instruction set architecture is only the first piece in this big game. It is also the completion of multi-party integration and development by Clover Company. After gaining considerable research and development experience, we took the first step cautiously.
Finding a reliable collaborator like Hua Hong is a win-win situation, and no one loses.
“Let’s hear 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. The reading 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 conversion is very fast, saving half of our energy."
The requirement in the demand specification is that the size of this player cannot be larger than a deck of cards. The size of the card is limited by battery power and memory stick storage space, and the design requires it to be replaceable. The rest of the functions are almost the same as those of later generations of portable MP3 players.
Due to the 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, you can also freely choose the 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 songs.
Of course, the premise is that you can tolerate the loss of sound quality caused by this compression.
(End of this chapter)