novelraw #516 - Leapfrog development opportunities
#516 - Leapfrog development opportunities
Ren Zhong wasn't quite aware of what these professors were thinking. Otherwise, it would have been a pleasant two-way street. However, for Ren Zhong, the most important thing was to solve the replication of this basic model and thoroughly understand the principles and manufacturing processes of all lithography machine components and various deposition equipment.
The current model is simply too ideal compared to establishing a separate chip foundry on his own.
Now, he only needs to solve the equipment purchase issue to have a large number of high-end talents available for free. The research funding he provides for them is much cheaper than maintaining a chip foundry.
After all, low-end chip manufacturing is not a good business. For a novice like Ren Zhong, who has no foundation in the chip industry, to barge in, he would easily lose everything.
Although it will cost 800 million yuan upfront, the subsequent investment will be very controllable.
Throughout the year, he can fund Professor Chen and his team's projects according to his ability, just like Hu Rentao's Materials Research Center. Although the current investment is not small, an expenditure of around 100 million yuan is not a big problem for Ren Zhong.
After all, Ren Zhong also brings back some valuable goods from the Bright Sword world every year and converts them into cash.
This equipment can be donated to the School of Electronic Engineering, but why can't it be donated to other universities? With such a huge amount of equipment, I believe no university engaged in semiconductors and chips can resist such temptation.
Even locally, there is also the School of Information Engineering, which also has semiconductor and chip design majors, but their technology is far behind the School of Electronic Engineering of Jincheng University of Science and Technology.
If Ren Zhong doesn't strictly limit the geographical restrictions, Chang'an also has a university with considerable electronic technology, which would be very happy to accept this batch of equipment to build its own chip foundry laboratory.
On this point, the school management is completely clear. A complete chip foundry production line equipment has a great bonus effect on the microelectronics and integrated circuit related disciplines of the university. With such a convenient foundry laboratory, the chip design level of their own school can be accelerated and a lot of costs can be reduced.
If we consider the full utilization of the production capacity of this production line, and undertake some tape-out and mass production businesses locally, it can even achieve self-sufficiency in the labor costs of the laboratory technical support personnel.
Through the re-examination of this matter, Ren Zhong realized that he had broken through his original thinking misunderstandings at once, and his whole person suddenly became enlightened.
For cutting-edge things, there is no need to build a complete set of things by himself, especially in the main world. He cannot bring equipment into the Bright Sword world on a large scale. Spending less money to do big things is what he should do, and he must be good at borrowing strength.
In fact, just like the material research model in the main world, he spends money to buy some equipment and fund the research and development funds of some projects, and uses the technical strength of universities or research institutes to develop, which is also a very good way.
He does not need to bear the entire laboratory human resources expenses, and does not need to fully support a large group of technical personnel like in the Bright Sword world, but chooses to share these talents with universities and research institutions, so that he does not need to bear much of the cost of supporting people.
After he puts forward clear research projects, he only needs to provide the necessary research funding for these projects, and then wait to accept their results. In addition to his projects, these people can also do other things, such as teaching and other affairs, which is equivalent to sharing intellectual resources. In this way, it saves a lot of money compared to recruiting people to form a research team, and more importantly, it saves a lot of time in management.
As long as his cooperative technical teams have strong professional ethics and the two parties cooperate for a long time, this model is actually very benign.
The early technology is relatively mature in the main world, so Ren Zhong does not need to consider realization in the main world, and encourages them to adopt "borrowing doctrine" to quickly realize the existing technology in the main world. At this time, the so-called copyright protection is completely useless to him, because Ren Zhong did not consider applying it in the main world, but transferred these research results to the Bright Sword world.
Of course, if there are no new technologies directly transformed through "borrowing doctrine", like the latest progress in materials, basically original research can be carried out. In this way, Ren Zhong may have to consider the issue of realization to solve the funding acquisition in the main world and realize larger-scale research.
Just like the second-generation high-temperature metal crystallization, Ren Zhong has a bold idea!
But now he can't take care of this, and temporarily concentrates on the chip aspect. Through this opportunity to build a chip processing laboratory for the School of Electronic Engineering, Ren Zhong sees the opportunity for a leap-forward development in the lithography machine aspect of chip processing equipment in the Bright Sword world.
There is no need to evolve step by step from 2 microns, 1 micron, 0.8 microns, 0.5 microns, 0.35 microns, 0.18 microns, and 0.13 microns. Now there is an opportunity to leap from 2 microns directly to 90nm!
In this way, Ren Zhong suddenly felt that the technical route of following the x86 route step by step was not enough.
The current chip design in the Bright Sword world is still developing X86 step by step according to the old ideas that Ren Zhong obtained from the main world, but the CPU circuit design drawings of X86, after entering 286, are basically difficult to obtain circuit design drawings, and must rely on the team to design and evolve.
After laying the technical foundation of 8080 and 8086, it is not too difficult to evolve according to the process flow, but the more transistors are realized later, the more talents must be invested in chip design to cope with it.
According to the current talent training of integrated circuits in the Bright Sword world, this is a bit unable to keep up with the needs of development.
Of course, there is no major problem in developing a generation of CPU in one and a half years, but the problem is that now if Ren Zhong breaks through the leap-forward development of lithography machines, there is no need for chip design to repeat low-level steps, but to find ways to achieve jumps!
In terms of X86, Ren Zhong can now purchase direct circuit design channels with considerable narrowness and extremely low possibilities.
But in another channel, ARM, Ren Zhong can obtain quite rich information with less money, and even get most of ARM's designs for free!
Through his communication with Sun Shanhe and the others, Ren Zhong roughly understood the ARM licensing system. The most convenient option for him was processor licensing. In this model, ARM designs a CPU or GPU and sells the complete design license to partners. After purchasing the license, you can produce a very stable and reliable CPU by following the blueprints and outsourcing the manufacturing. Of course, in this model, the purchaser has limited room to customize the kernel, modify optimizations, or exert their own creativity. However, there are still numerous options available, such as configuring modules, the number of cores, cache size, clock speed, manufacturing process, and choosing a foundry. ARM also provides guidance and assistance, but how the design is transformed into a chip and its specifications depend on your own ideas and intended applications.
To promote their technology, ARM offers two super low-cost licensing options. One is academic licensing, which is essentially free but only available to universities and research institutions. The other is DesignStart licensing, designed for learning and promotion. It primarily facilitates semiconductor companies' low-cost, low-risk, and rapid understanding of ARM IP. The price is as low as tens of thousands of US dollars, which is very affordable for a CPU design. However, chips designed under these two licenses cannot be sold and are only for internal research.
For commercial purposes, this license is naturally insufficient. However, for Ren Zhong, it was more than perfect, as his sales weren't in the main world!
After understanding these rules, Ren Zhong directly purchased the DesignStart licenses for all available ARM versions, obtaining the basic CPU design data packages for each generation. He also purchased several complete development and design software packages to ensure that major designs could receive after-sales support and consultation. For the bulk of the software packages, he opted for cracked versions, prioritizing saving money and living frugally!
Although CPUs of ARM11 and later versions couldn't be manufactured in the Bright Sword world,
Ren Zhong didn't mind spending over a million US dollars as a reserve.
Once the lithography machine system from the Electronic Academy could be completely replicated in the Bright Sword world, the Bright Sword world would leap to the ARM11 era, a massive and earth-shattering jump compared to the current 286.
If adapted with the Harmony system, future desktops, mobile devices, and even servers could be completely replaced with the ARM series.
Achieving the development of a single ARM technology roadmap.
At this moment, on the other side of the ocean, inside the top-tier semiconductor research centers of MBI and Bell in the rogue nation, they were still frantically researching and evolving the 8080 chip design and manufacturing technology. The reverse engineering work had fully commenced, achieving complete autonomy in military CPUs. However, considering the impact of commercial patent licensing, these two companies didn't have the face to directly release the reverse-engineered product to the market. Instead, they made micro-innovations based on it, preparing to launch their own "designed" new CPU.
At the same time, MBI was inspired by this and started research on RISC chips earlier than in the main world. Their first-generation 801 chip integrated more than 8,000 transistors, achieving stronger performance than the 8080.
According to their plan, they would develop a new generation of personal PCs and host servers based on the 801 chip, achieving direct competition with Dongda in the computer era.
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While Dongda's computer technology was advancing, these two companies and research institutions, concentrating the top semiconductor and computer talents of the rogue nation, did achieve a leap from transistor computers to integrated circuit computers in research and development. If Ren Zhong hadn't intervened in the Bright Sword world, it would be hard to say who would win between Dongda's computer industry, which had started ahead, and the rogue nation.
There might be some unpredictable factors affecting the development of the entire process.
Although Dongda had completed the layout of many basic computer patents in the field of personal computers, the X86 technology system was tightly sealed with patents, with all core patents in Dongda's hands. There was no possibility of evolving X86 and surpassing it.
However, MBI was taking another technical route of reduced instruction sets, so it depended on who could run faster.
From the history of the main world, X86 and RISC each had their own merits. X86 had the advantage in PCs, but in the mobile internet era, the world belonged to reduced instruction sets when facing mobile terminals.
The two sides had their own victories and defeats at different times. In the end, there was a trend of the two merging into one. Desktop PCs wanted to develop towards mobility, while mobile terminals wanted to eat up the market share of desktop and server terminals. They were once intertwined.
However, in the history known to Ren Zhong, the two still had their own development.
Ensuring that they both had their own living space, after all, the advantages and disadvantages of the two technologies each existed.
In terms of performance, X86's performance was difficult to catch up with. Therefore, the X86 technology system dominated in the desktop and server industries. However, as ARM continued to improve performance and catch up with X86, in Ren Zhong's current era, some ARM products had replaced desktops.
Even servers used ARM chip designs.
As chip designs became more and more complex and performance became stronger and stronger, the performance of ARM was overflowing for ordinary home users.
However, mankind's pursuit of performance is endless, which has led to the continuous evolution of CPUs. People's demand for entertainment and high-performance computing has led to the fact that CPU performance will never be enough.
Faster and faster!
For such application-driven, at least in the silicon-based era, it will never be satisfied.
In Ren Zhong's main world timeline, no one felt that their computer or mobile phone performance was strong enough and didn't need to improve.
However, in the current Bright Sword world, MBI and Bell didn't know what kind of monstrous team they were facing.
They were still following the information that Dongda had announced that the 286 was about to be released and a brand new "powerful" personal computer would be on the market.
After completing the 286 design, Dongda's research team in the Bright Sword world started designing the 386 computer, which was twice as powerful as the 286. On the milestone plan of the technical route, the 386 computer would be a full 32-bit computer, and its performance would be another leap compared to the 286.
After independently designing two generations of CPUs, Dongda's chip design team in the Bright Sword world had made a lot of progress. Most of the backbones had been trained, and the information provided by Ren Zhong for the 386 was quite detailed, including the logical module distribution design, bus design, input and output interface design, and many other key principles, which were very clear.
Following the original technical route, there was actually no big problem, but the speed would be more normal, and it wouldn't make the competitors feel the oppressive despair!
After re-sorting out the chip layout during this period, Ren Zhong was very satisfied with the progress. Now he was just waiting for the equipment to be in place, and the team would start following up on the operation of the production line to carry out follow-up work.
In this way, Ren Zhong felt that he could take a breath and do something else. (End of this chapter)