Xia Guo, the testing department of Xiaxin International, a major chip manufacturer. Ou Kangjian, the supervisor who had just attended a meeting, returned to the office a little tired and threw the information in his hand on the desk.

In the meeting just now, the Chief Operating Officer COO conveyed the latest requirements, asking all departments to work together to increase research and development efforts, improve chip performance and yield rate, and so on.

In fact, these are all clichés. Who doesn’t know the difficulties and dilemmas that Xia Guo’s chip industry is currently facing? The COO even came up with “two bombs and one satellite” to encourage everyone, but can the two situations be the same?

Objectively speaking, it was indeed more difficult to study "two bombs and one satellite" back then. Qian Lao and other older generation scientists finally achieved success in research and development under the conditions of extremely limited talent and materials, which is definitely an amazing miracle!

In comparison, the conditions for "chip research and development" seem to be much better now, but unlike "two bombs and one satellite", as long as it is developed, it will be a big victory! Chip research is closer to commercial technology, and it needs to face the test of market competition.

, we must constantly strive for excellence and directly compete with the products of international giants in the market, otherwise not many people will purchase chips with inferior performance out of nostalgia!

Just like the Pengpai S1 of a certain rice company, which is known as the first core of domestic mobile phone chips, it was successfully installed on mobile phones. The result? It was extremely ignored in the market! In the final analysis, this is not because the price/performance ratio is too low and the stability is not as good.

Foreign chips? However, the technological gap is so easy to catch up with! The market is not popular, which will seriously affect the subsequent research and development funds, and it will be more difficult to produce superior chips...

As a major domestic chip manufacturer, Ou Kangjian has a very intuitive understanding and feeling of this, so he is somewhat immune to the chicken blood injected by the COO.

What's more, chip research and development spans dozens of fields such as physical materials science, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and geometric optics, electronic circuits, integrated circuits, graph theory, etc. "Lameness" in any field will affect chip research and development.

Another example is the chip manufacturing process, which involves a large number of high-end equipment, such as single crystal furnaces, vapor phase epitaxy furnaces, oxidation furnaces, chemical mechanical polishers, photolithography machines, etching machines, ion implanters, wafer dicing machines, etc.

Wait, there are more than a hundred processes to be carried out. Every high-end equipment is a difficulty, and every process has a huge gap with the international advanced level...

Even in China, the manufacturing technology of 14nm process chips has not been fully mastered and popularized, while major foreign manufacturers have completely occupied the 5nm chip market. Faced with such a huge gap and technology generation gap, Xia Guo's chip research and development is seeking to accelerate and overtake. It is really

Difficult! Difficult! Difficult!

If it hadn't been for the emergence of the purely domestic EDA "Qiguang" in the past two years, which gave chip practitioners a great incentive and encouragement, it is estimated that domestic chips would now face unsolvable problems in design alone.

O'Kangjian closed his eyes tiredly and unwillingly, sat down on his seat, and calmed down his emotions.

Suddenly there was a rapid knock on the door, and then he heard someone shouting urgently at the door: "Director Ou, I have something important to report to you!"

Ou Kangjian opened his eyes, rubbed his face, and tried to cheer himself up. He always believed that not showing any fatigue or negative emotions in front of his subordinates was the most basic quality of a supervisor.

"Come in and talk, what's the matter?" Ou Kangjian looked up and saw that he was a technical team leader in the testing department named Luo Zhenjie.

Luo Zhenjie walked in quickly: "Director Ou, didn't you arrange to test a few chips that were just delivered yesterday?"

Ou Kangjian nodded. Of course he remembered what happened yesterday afternoon. These chips were personally delivered by Yang Nanyu, the supervisor of the manufacturing department, and he was repeatedly asked to test them in detail and keep all test results confidential.

He often receives similar tasks. Every time a self-developed chip is released in the factory, there will be such a secret testing task.

But often such self-developed chips have problems of one kind or another. Out of a hundred test tasks, at least ninety-seven times the results are extremely unoptimistic. In the end, they can be successfully finalized and enter the tape-out process. The new packaging and testing process.

There are even fewer self-developed chips.

So after receiving the task yesterday, he didn't pay much attention to it. Just because Yang Nanyu, the director of the manufacturing department, sent it personally, he arranged for Luo Zhenjie's technical team, the most skilled in the testing department, to conduct the test.

"Oh? Are the test results available so soon?"

Luo Zhenjie nodded vigorously: "Actually, we finished the test in the early morning, but the results were too incredible. We also tested several other chips. It took a lot of time, and now we have the final test report of all the chips."

The look on his face was a little strange, as if he couldn't believe it, but also seemed to be full of surprises, which made Ou Kangjian even more confused.

What test results can make Luo Zhenjie, who has been in the industry for more than ten years and has extremely rich experience, look like this?

"Where's the test report? Let me see it."

Luo Zhenjie immediately handed over the printed document with both hands: "The detailed report is here, please review it! There are six copies in total. In fact, they are all similar and basically consistent."

Ou Kangjian motioned Luo Zhenjie to sit on the sofa, and he slowly began to look through the information in his hand.

He quickly figured out that, well, it was just an ordinary 14nm process chip, which should be used on servers. The default frequency is 3.5GHz, and the highest frequency value of the mid-core family is 1930MHz. It is quite satisfactory and has no highlights.

Ou Kangjian continued to look carefully. The next second, he almost jumped out of his seat!

"It only took 3 milliseconds to increase from 0.01GHz to 3.9GHz? The highest acceleration frequency can reach 8GHz? The lowest idle speed dives to 20MHz? This...how is this possible!"

Ou Kangjian, as the director of the testing department, knows what these parameters mean. The energy saving and response speed alone are incredible! At least the most high-end 5nm chips in the world cannot achieve such terrifying results.

Value!

This chapter is not finished yet, please click on the next page to continue reading the exciting content! Taking Intel's latest model of 5nm consumer server CPU as an example, it takes 28 milliseconds to accelerate to the standard frequency of 3.9GHz! The maximum acceleration frequency is only 6GHz.

, the lowest idle speed dive can only reach about 250MHz!

This chip with a mere 14nm process can actually far surpass the 5nm high-end chips from major foreign manufacturers in terms of performance and energy saving?

Ou Kangjian couldn't believe his eyes.

He took a closer look and found that this chip was not only used for instruction throughput, fetch bandwidth test, scalar floating point addition instruction test, vector addition instruction test, latency indicators, instruction fetch decoding test, reordering and slow-order reading and writing

Test, automatic effective frequency value test... On more than one hundred test indicators, all of them are astonishingly excellent. It can even be said that they far surpass all the chips he knows that can be purchased on the market!

"Is this...is this really the self-developed chip sent by the manufacturing department yesterday?" Ou Kangjian swallowed, and it took him a while to recover from the shock.

The impact of this report on him was as incredible as seeing primary school students achieve scores far exceeding those of Qingbei doctoral students in the doctoral academic examination!

"Yes." Luo Zhenjie nodded vigorously: "This is actually the A9001S fully self-developed chip launched by our factory last year. The architecture and design details are exactly the same, and there is no difference in the processing process. I don't know why the same

Due to the technological process, the performance of these chips will be so incredible..."

"A9001S? Impossible, absolutely impossible!" Of course Ou Kangjian is familiar with this chip independently designed and developed by Qiguang EDA in his factory. This is also the best server version mass-produced chip model in the factory at present, and he can barely do it.

It is competitive with the 14nm chips produced by major international manufacturers, but there is a gap of about 30% compared to the internationally mainstream 7nm chips, let alone the 5nm chips.

There is no way a high-end chip like this far surpasses 5nm!

Luo Zhenjie guessed: "Maybe it's because it doesn't use silicon wafers? "

"It's not silicon wafers? What kind of material is it?"

"I don't know. We can't do material testing, so we can't tell." Luo Zhenjie told the truth. They were testing the chip itself, not the chip material, and they didn't have relevant observation equipment.

"Come on, show me, I want to see you test it myself!"

It's not that he doesn't believe Luo Zhenjie's team, but the test results are so shocking that Ou Kangjian would never believe them without seeing them with his own eyes.

At this time, the sun was setting in the west. All members of Luo Zhenjie's team had not slept all night, and their eyes were already bloodshot. However, everyone still looked excited. They did not shirk Ou Kangjian's request for another test, but instead responded with the most serious and meticulous attitude.

The most standard testing process was used to test these mysterious chips that are obviously identical to the A9001S, but are absolutely different.

Ou Kangjian is also a technical expert who started as a front-line technician. In this test, he even performed the floating point performance test himself.

It was after nine o'clock in the evening when all the test results finally came out. Ou Kangjian, who had not even eaten dinner, was holding the latest test report, his hands shaking a little.

This test report is almost exactly the same as the report given to him by Luo Zhenjie. Some performance indicators were also improved because he temporarily increased the input voltage slightly!

It’s incredible! This...where did this magical chip come from?

Ou Kangjian quickly took out his mobile phone and called Yang Nanyu, the supervisor of the manufacturing department: "Old Yang, are you still in the factory? If you are, come and see me! Yes, it's my testing room here. Now, there's something big going on!"

Yang Nanyu is also a workaholic. He still hasn't gone home at this time. He quickly came with two technicians: "Lao Ou, how are you? Did you finish testing your chip yesterday and got the results?"

Ou Kangjian grabbed him and said, "Yes. Tell me first, where did this chip come from?"

Seeing his old friend's eyes red with excitement and breathing heavily, Yang Nanyu couldn't help but become nervous: "It's made in our factory using the manufacturing process and technology of A9001S, but using the latest chip material provided by a certain research center.

That’s all. I heard that this kind of chip material is just a sample. Anyway, the processes from coating, photolithography and development, etching, doping, oxidation, polishing, etc. are no different from silicon wafers. It’s just that the yield rate is lower than what we import from abroad.

The high-grade silicon wafer is much higher. What, there is something wrong with the test results?”

"There is a problem, and it's a big problem. You can see for yourself." Ou Kangjian handed the test report with his name signed in the reviewer column to Yang Nanyu.

Yang Nanyu is also someone who is used to seeing test reports. He only read it for a while and was stunned. After a while, he lost his voice and said: "Is this...this...is this test report correct? Ours is a 14nm chip.

It's not a 2nm chip... No, it seems that a 2nm chip may not have such performance!"

The two technicians who came with him couldn't help but come over to take a look.

Soon there was another exclamation:

"Holy shit (*｀へ′*), what the hell kind of data is this?"

"Isn't it too outrageous? We actually created this kind of dream chip?"

"This is definitely better than Intel's latest i9 series chips, right?"

"i9? Comparing i9 with this dream chip, doesn't it insult this dream chip? How dare you compare i9 with this dream chip? I guess only the rumored 1nm chip that has not yet been released can be higher than it.

Down!"

After a long time, the shock and disbelief that filled the testing room slowly dissipated, and the yelling finally subsided.

Ou Kangjian looked at Yang Nanyu and carefully confirmed: "Old Yang, can I ask, is this indeed a chip material independently developed by a domestic research institute in our country?"

"Yes." The shock on Yang Nanyu's face has not disappeared: "I just don't know where the research was done. It is not marked on the task list. I only know that it is a task arranged by Secretary Lu personally, so we must pay attention to it.

, otherwise I wouldn’t have just made it and sent it to you for testing…”

This chapter is not over yet, please click on the next page to continue reading! "Secretary Lu... is it the chip materials research laboratory of Xia Ke Academy?"

Yang Nanyu shook his head: "It's not like that. They have been cooperating with us for a long time and have not made any breakthroughs in the past two years. They also sent some samples last week. It is said that they only have about 5% of last year's results.

Promotion will never be so unnatural."

"No matter what, if it is really domestically developed chip materials, does it mean that we can counterattack the international mainstream 5nm chips with 14nm chips?"

"As long as the cost of this chip material does not exceed five times the imported price of high-grade silicon wafers, I think it will have great market competitiveness. With the performance of this dream chip, I think we boast that we have mastered the chip technology of the 2nm process.

There shouldn’t be anyone who would doubt…”

Ou Kangjian and Yang Nanyu looked at each other, still feeling as if they were in a dream.
To be continued...