Chapter 1363: Getting the Scale Right
Today's chip development is far from being "stuck", but step by step, from an initial imbalance in the industry to a serious dependence on itself, It has to go through a process.
The origins of the chip industry can be traced back to the early 1950s, when the technology was still microelectronic tubes.
In the 1960s, the technology entered the era of MOS transistors, and its emergence became one of the foundations for the advent of the chip era.
In the following ten years, with the continuous improvement and development of transistor technology, 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 achieve 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, integrating human The level of science and technology has been pushed to a new level.
The next two years will be a critical period for the chip industry. With the further expansion of chips, starting from 1995, the industry will enter the era of very large-scale integrated circuit chips, or VLSI.
This is when China began to become backward.
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, and what is 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 908 project that failed.
But on the other hand, 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 a very difficult thing in itself to find an opportunity to invest while also harvesting output value, converting products into commodities that can be sold, and ultimately turning them into 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 transistor chip was reduced to the micron level; in the 1970s, the third-generation chip appeared, and its size was reduced to the micron level. The size has been reduced to the sub-micron level.
In the 1990s, 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. This 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 "sub-micron" chip.
Even if the 908 project in China has failed, the 6-inch chip production line with a monthly output of 12,000 pieces has been put into production, and its manufacturing process is as large as 1 micron.
In other words, the current gap between domestic and international countries 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. superior.
There is also the application 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.
Up to now, Clover has very few things that can be used by large foreign companies. It almost only has the core of the company - the MiniCOS universal platform instruction set.
How to maximize the effectiveness of existing things is a thoughtful matter.
“Our company has positioned itself in the field of software and hardware communication and continues to work hard on the operating system.” Zhou Zhi said: “To be precise, the design and production of the two chips this time is just the company’s goal. At the right time, I just did a little business expansion in my own field of "lower inclusive collection". ”
"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, It is inevitable to introduce strategic partners.”
“Since we have several parties. The intention or need for cooperation is the basis for negotiation." Zhou Zhi pointed out three fingers: "I will be honest and put forward what Clover wants: the near future is to introduce a NAND flash memory chip production line. Companies in your country will jointly manufacture memory sticks; in the medium term, they will control MPEG-2 DVDs. Regarding production technology, we welcome companies in your country to adopt our standards and jointly build factories to manufacture decoding chips; in the long term, we will work together to formulate international factory automation control equipment standards, and develop digital controllers and distributed digital controls based on this standard. System."
"Well..." Matsui Zuo and Jin Chunyi couldn't help but fell into thought.
It should be said that these three items proposed by Zhou Zhi are all difficult, but the scales are also very precise.
(End of this chapter)