Mi Guangnan pondered for a moment and then asked Wan Feng a question: "Young man, since you want to make chips, let me ask you, can you explain clearly what a chip is?"
To answer this question, I can use a Chinese idiom to describe it: an old sheep is frozen to death in June - it's a long story.
"To put it simply, a chip is a microcircuit."
Mi Guangnan nodded: "Yes, can you explain it in more detail?"
Why does this feel like an exam?
"When you talk about chips, you can't talk about integrated circuits. The invention of integrated circuits in the 1950s greatly improved the efficiency of discrete transistors. Chips were created by integrating countless discrete microtransistors onto a small pure silicon wafer. They have two huge advantages over discrete transistors: cost and performance."
Mi Guangnan showed interest: "Go on."
"The cost is low because the chip prints all the components as a unit through photolithography technology, rather than making only one transistor at a time. This greatly reduces the material cost of making a single transistor."
Mi Guangnan nodded.
"The high performance is due to the components switching quickly, which consumes less energy and produces more efficiency."
"Although the explanation is a bit vague, it's generally correct. I didn't expect you guys to actually research chips. Could you please tell me about the chip manufacturing process?"
Wan Feng didn't quite understand this question before. It's not that he hadn't seen it on the Internet in his previous life, but it was too boring and uninteresting. He just glanced at it and didn't remember much.
But recently, when Wan Feng was free and chatting with Gu Hongzhong and Qin Guanghui, Gu Hongzhong used the example of building a house to help Wan Feng remember the chip manufacturing process.
"We know that the main steps to building a house are laying the foundation, building the walls, and then putting up the beams and capping the roof, right?"
Mi Guangnan and Wan Shouwu nodded.
"If chip manufacturing is like building a house, the first step is to lay the foundation. After many experiments in the early years, foreign countries determined that the best material for chip construction is the wafer, that is, a thin slice of single-crystal silicon. This is the foundation of the entire building, and the quality of the superstructure directly determines the quality of the foundation."
"continue!"
"Don't be fooled by the high-end sound of monocrystalline silicon wafers. Their origins are far from noble. They're more colloquially called sand, or more elegantly, quartz sand. Cement also contains a large amount of silicon. The purity requirements for monocrystalline silicon wafers used in chip manufacturing are extremely high. Even if it can't reach 100%, it must reach 99%. Our country has a history of over 30 years in silicon wafer manufacturing, having produced the first one in the late 1950s. This certainly meets our needs."
Seeing that everyone at the table was listening attentively, Wan Feng took a sip of drink to moisten his throat and continued.
"It's not that there are no other materials that can replace single-crystal silicon. Gallium arsenide is also a good alternative. I think our country had a factory that successfully manufactured it in the 1960s."
"In 1962, a Tianjing factory produced gallium arsenide."
"Now that we have the materials, we're laying the foundation. We'll make this pure silicon into silicon ingots, which will become the carrier for the quartz semiconductors used to make integrated circuits. Slicing these ingots will create the wafers needed for chip production. The thinner the wafer and the larger its diameter, the lower the production cost, but the higher the process requirements."
Mi Guangnan nodded continuously after hearing this.
Originally, he just asked casually, just wanting to see how much money this little guy who boasted about making chips had in his stomach, but he didn't expect that this guy would talk so eloquently as soon as he opened his mouth.
"Once we had the foundation, we officially started building the building. From painting to developing, etching, drying and manufacturing, the process is very complicated and requires extremely high craftsmanship. This is where we lag behind foreign countries."
Mi Guangnan's face looked a little heavy.
"After this stage, a grid of grains is formed on the wafer. The electrical characteristics of each grain are tested using a probe test. The finished wafer is fixed, the pins are bonded, and various packaging forms are produced according to requirements. The house is then built."
"Your explanation is very interesting. It seems that your decision to make chips wasn't made on a whim. You've clearly done your homework. I wonder how much you know about the current chip industry? And what prospects do you have for its future development?"
"The 386 is the world's most popular chip right now, and the 486 is next... It's the end of April now, so Intel's chips have already been released, right?"
"?" Mi Guangnan was a little confused. He didn't really know that this legendary chip had been released.
"It's a successor to its predecessor, with a very similar instruction set and only a few additional instructions. Its architecture represents a significant breakthrough. It has a built-in data cache, a floating-point processor, and multiple pipelines. It has 1.2 million transistors and is manufactured using a one-micron process. This is likely the last micron-scale chip, as subsequent chip manufacturing processes will enter the nanometer era, moving from 500 nanometers to 350 nanometers and finally to 10 nanometers."
"Ten nanometers?" Mi Guangnan was extremely shocked.
What does this mean? A human hair is sixty microns, and one micron is equal to one thousand nanometers.
These ten nanometers?
“Will it really get to that stage?”
"I'm sure that if you stay healthy, you might see it when you're in your seventies."
Mi Guangnan frowned and remained silent for a long time.
"Young man! Tell me about your plan."
"Intel's chips are about to enter the nanometer stage. I estimate it will appear in five or six years. We are already far behind them. If we don't seize this market quickly, it will be completely occupied by them. In the future, this may be a market worth hundreds of billions of yuan. This is the purpose of our determination to develop chips. If we just talk about making money, that's a bit vulgar. In the future, military industry will also use a large number of chips. Just imagine our missiles and aircraft using foreign chips. Do you think this is reassuring?"
Mi Guangnan's expression began to become serious.
"That's exactly the truth!"
"This is not important. If war breaks out and foreign countries stop supplying us with chips, will we still have a chance of winning?"
There was a qualitative change in Mi Guangnan's gaze when he looked at Wan Feng, and his thinking level became higher.
"So, we need to develop chips and semiconductors, even if it means selling everything we have. But we're short on talent. Uncle Mi, have you considered joining our company? I'll triple the salary you're paid, including your team."
There is no pressure at all for poaching Xiang Wanfeng. For such a company, it doesn't matter whether it exists or not.
Maybe it's a good thing that it's collapsed now.
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