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Of course, Li Xuan has no plans to build a wafer factory from scratch, which takes too long, and the daylily will be cold when the wafer factory is built. The strategy he formulated for Dongfang Electronics was to acquire ready-made wafer factories.

Since last year, many wafer factories in the United States have had a hard time. Japanese wafer factories led by Hitachi, NEC, Fujitsu, etc. began to reduce the ex-factory price of 32K DRAM memory, and American manufacturers were forced to respond, and the tragic price war made many American IT companies fall into the quagmire of losses!

In the 80s, the American business circles had reached the point where the talk was changing color, and after Japanese manufacturers of the steel, household appliances, and automobile industries invaded the US market, they beat their American counterparts to the point where they could only parry and were unable to fight back. Now this trend has finally spread to the semiconductor industry.

According to the latest statistics from the American Semiconductor Association, the market share of Japanese manufacturers in the DRAM memory market has reached 60%. Seven or eight years ago, Japan's semiconductor industry was only transferring some obsolete technologies that Americans could not look down on, but now the technology gap between the two sides is only a generation difference of one or two years.

Not long ago, at an academic conference, a technician from Hewlett-Packard announced a number that Americans were very ashamed of from the perspective of a buyer. HP has conducted quality tests on DRAM chips from major manufacturers in the two countries, and the results show that the product failure rate of the three companies with the highest pass rate in the United States is six times that of the three companies with the lowest pass rate in Japan.

The three factories with the highest pass rate in the United States are Deyi Corporation, Intel Corporation and Mostek Corporation. Rewind a few years ago. It is these three companies that monopolize the major share of the memory market worldwide. But it is the so-called 30 years in the east of the river, 30 years in the west of the river. The rise of the Japanese has made life more and more difficult for these semiconductor giants.

Li Xuan flew directly from Hong Kong to San Francisco and stayed overnight in San Francisco. After a short break, we flew south to Texas.

In the future, there were two important IT towns in the United States, one is the world-famous Silicon Valley of California, and the other is the "Silicon Hill" located in Texas. Silicon Mound refers to the city of Austin, which is just on the verge of the www.biquge.info of the Pen Fun Pavilion in the hilly terrain of Texas, so it is nicknamed "Silicon Mound".

Austin is conveniently located between three of the state's most important cities, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, and is also home to the University of Texas, one of the most famous universities in Texas. Of course, the city of Austin now. It has not yet begun to get involved with the semiconductor industry. The destination of Li Xuan's trip is Dallas, where Texas Instruments (TI), a world-class semiconductor company, is located.

On the surface, Li Xuan's trip was to negotiate with Deyi to acquire a wafer factory in Silicon Valley, but his more important purpose was actually to meet someone.

Before Li Xuan left San Francisco, it was rarely raining in San Francisco, but when he arrived at the Fort Worth airport in Dallas, the sky was clear. Through the glass curtain wall of the airport lobby, the blue sky outside the window is cloudless.

Fort Worth Airport is one of the busiest major hub airports in the United States. There are planes taking off and landing from the runway, and the airport hall is very crowded. Li Xuan took his entourage and walked out of the pick-up gate leisurely.

"Mr. Li Xuan, welcome to Dallas!" a dignified-looking oriental face. Smiled and waved at him.

When he is young, he is ambitious, and when he is old, he is highly respected, and he can create an industry, and he can also influence an industry! This sentence should be the best description of the man in front of him.

"Mr. Zhang Zhongmou. Please come to the airport to greet you!" Li Xuan appropriately expressed his gratitude.

Li Xuan is no stranger to the person in front of him who is known as the "godfather of Taiwan's semiconductors", but he has been described by later newspapers as a person who supports the economy of a region. Of course, Zhang Zhongmou has not yet chosen to return to Taiwan to start a business. He is still the senior executive vice president of Deyi Company.

He should also be one of the first Chinese executives in the U.S. IT industry, having become vice president in charge of semiconductor business as early as ten years ago. But he has never been able to break through the last ceiling and become the real head of this large company. Li Xuan read his autobiography in later generations and knew that he was a strict and serious person with an indomitable personality.

Zhang Zhongmou prepared a family banquet for Li Xuan in his home, and his wife specially prepared a sumptuous table of Chinese food for the guests who came from afar. The two talked happily at the dinner table, Zhang Zhongmou is a person who likes to read history, and the two talked about "Zuo's Spring and Autumn" to "Historical Records", but they found a lot of common language.

The exchange at the dinner table gave Li Xuan and the other party a little more understanding of each other. After the meal, Li Xuan first visited the very Chinese-style home arranged by Mrs. Zhang under the guidance of the host. Then, the two entered the study and began a real conversation.

"Mr. Zhang, what do you think of Japanese semiconductor manufacturers entering the U.S. market now!" Li Xuan asked seemingly casually.

"I have to admit that Japanese counterparts are indeed doing better than American companies in terms of cost control!" Zhang Zhongmou personally made Li Xuan a cup of Pu'er tea, and then continued, "I have had many exchanges with several Japanese companies, and they will take any reform measures that may reduce costs and improve efficiency seriously, and they will persistently pursue them."

U.S. companies are much less cost-sensitive. Over time, the consequence is that the yield rate of the American fab is only 50%, while the Japanese fab can reach 70% or even 80% using the same process technology. With such a huge gap in yield, the costs of both sides are not on the same starting line at all!"

Li Xuan said with a smile: "So the solution of a company like Deyi is to use backward production capacity and use more advanced technology to reduce costs, so as to gain a competitive advantage!"

The Silicon Valley facility, which Deyi intends to transfer to Dongfang Electronics, has two 3-inch production lines and uses 2.5-micron process technology. This should be regarded as a wafer fab for the current mainstream process, but Deyi can no longer achieve a competitive advantage in this technical level.

Zhang Zhongmou nodded with a wry smile and said, "The headquarters has decided to build a new 4-inch factory in Houston, which will use the 1.8-micron lithography machine newly developed by GCA!"

3 inches and 4 inches refer to the diameter of the wafer cylinder. The first step in the production of semiconductor chips is to manufacture high-purity silicon crystals, which are then cut and sliced. The larger the diameter of the wafer, the larger the area of each wafer. As a result, a single wafer can be divided into more chips, and the cost per chip can be reduced relatively much.

Whereas 2.5 microns and 1.5 microns refer to the lithography line width of the lithography machine. The thinner the lithography line, the smaller the area occupied by the individual collective tubes on the chip. When the same number of transistors are integrated, the smaller the process, the smaller the size of the chip. As a result, wafers of the same size can be divided into more chips, reducing chip costs.

Therefore, wafer diameter and process are the two most important indicators to consider whether a fab is advanced or not.

Since Deyi is going to invest in the construction of more advanced wafer factories, the original old factories have naturally become backward production capacity that needs to be processed. Equipment depreciation in the semiconductor industry is generally four to five years, but Deyi's factory in Silicon Valley was only completed and put into operation at the end of 1978, and it has only been two years since it was full, so it is naturally impossible to shut down directly.

Dongfang Electronics suddenly came out and said that it was willing to acquire, which gave Deyi a chance to recover part of the investment. So the two sides hit it off, and the negotiations went very smoothly. This factory, which has a monthly output of 12,000 wafers, only needs to be discounted by $6.75 million, and it was pocketed by Li Xuan.

Thirty years later, Intel invested $2 billion to build a wafer fab, which is hundreds of times cleaner than the most thoroughly sterilized operating room, and a lithography machine costs more than $100 million.

But now the threshold for investing in a wafer fab is not so perverted, and it only costs about $10 million to build a new wafer fab with the most advanced process.

"In my opinion, Japanese companies have invested no less money in technology than American companies, and the technological generation gap between the two sides will only get smaller and smaller! American companies can only compete with Japanese companies by improving their production links and increasing the wafer yield rate!" Li Xuan said with a smile.

Li Xuan naturally knew that the American semiconductor companies did not rely on their technological advantages to maintain the suppression of Japanese IT companies, but were defeated by Japan, and in the end they could only rely on the US government to come forward and force the Japanese government to sign a "Japan-US Semiconductor Agreement", which barely retained a trace of vitality.

But even so, companies such as Deyi and Intel have successively withdrawn from the competition in the field of DRAM memory. It was not until the rise of South Korea's Samsung and Taiwan's foundry that the glory of Japanese companies in the field of memory came to an end.

Zhang Zhongmou nodded thoughtfully: "I agree with Mr. Li's view, American semiconductor companies have long been in the leading position in technology, even if the production management is relatively extensive, they can still obtain high profits. But when competitors' technologies begin to catch up, and the two sides begin a price war with bayonets, American companies are clearly at a disadvantage!"

"Now all IT companies in the United States design their own chips, and then produce them by their own wafer factories, and most of the company's focus is mainly on chip research and development, rather than chip production! Is it possible to set up an independent company, without thinking about chip research and development, only focus on wafer production, and make every effort to improve production efficiency and chip yield!" Li Xuan said suddenly.

Zhang Zhongmou's eyes lit up, but he asked with some doubts: "I remember that your company also has a chip research and development business, so how to deal with the relationship between the two?"

He actually understood that Li Xuan's purpose in coming to him was to invite him to join Dongfang Electronics Company. But before that, Sun Zhongmou had not made any decisions, after all, Dongfang Electronics was still only a small company compared to Texas Instruments. (My novel "Rebirth Electronic Empire" will have more fresh content on the official WeChat platform, and there will be a 100% lottery gift for everyone!Open WeChat now, click on the "+" sign in the upper right corner "Add Friends", search for the official account "qdread" and follow, hurry up!) (To be continued......)