For this meeting on the afternoon of January 2, 1973, Intel R&D engineer Fajin and sales director Galbo actually didn't have much hope, even if Zhang Heng reported an astonishing purchase volume in the previous telephone communication.

That's what every visitor says at the beginning.

Since the successful development of the 4004 for RB calculator manufacturer Busicom, they have regularly received representatives from similar manufacturers.

There are all kinds of manufacturers, some produce electronic watches, some produce rice cookers, some produce medical equipment, and the most astonishing thing is that there is even a manufacturer of slot machines for Las Vegas casinos, and wants to commission Intel to improve the random signal generator circuit inside the slot machine.

In the face of high costs and cumbersome design processes, these manufacturers all retreated, which is fully in line with the judgment of Intel's top management on microprocessor chips.

The young man from Xiangjiang in front of him, except that his youth is memorable, should be no different from the previous visitors.

However, after some customary greetings, the first words spoken by the young man made the two of them sit upright.

"If I place a certain number of orders, can you transfer the 8008 patent to me?"

"Nani?!" At this moment, Fajin suddenly remembered Shoda Shima.

The RB engineer from Busicom, who had just taken over the 4004 project and was sent to Silicon Valley to inspect and approve Intel's final design, was shocked to say the word when he learned that the 4004 had not even been drawn with a single device.

Gilbo was stunned for a moment and asked, "I'm sorry, can I tell me more about your request?"

Zhang Heng repeated it, and Galbo shook his head again and again: "Impossible! Since the 4004 incident happened, Intel will not consider using the method you said on this series of chips for the time being." ”

On the 4004 project, Intel has already suffered a big loss.

Busicom commissioned Intel to design and manufacture the chip, and bought out all its rights, including patent rights, exclusive use rights, etc., but later the RB manufacturer deliberately lowered the price under the pretext of Intel's delayed delivery.

Intel had to agree to this alliance under the premise of its own loss, but fortunately, they took back the patent and exclusive right to use the 4004, so that they were able to launch an improved version of the 8008 on the basis of the 4004, the 8008A.

Zhang Heng understands the mentality of Intel's top executives.

Although there is no light at the end of the tunnel for the microprocessor family, because of the strong advocacy of Farggin and his supervisor Ted Hough, Intel has a vague idea, but this idea is not yet urgent enough to be realized immediately.

This is perfectly in line with the character of Robert Noyce, president of Intel.

A Ph.D. graduate from MIT (Shockley was his senior), Noyce is a talented and confident man.

When Shockley called him to invite him to an interview, and before he was officially hired, Noyce immediately quit his old job and rushed to Palo Alto with his wife and children.

The first thing he did when he arrived in Silicon Valley was not to rush to the interview, but to buy a house near the Shockley Lab and settle his family before applying for a job.

Decades later, when a reporter asked why Noyce did this, he replied, "Because I can't think of any reason not to be hired." ”

Cattle people are so confident!

Noyce also proved his talent with facts, and less than a month after entering the Shockley laboratory, he proposed to Shockley to carry out research on tunnel diodes, but was sternly rejected by the stubborn Shockley, and the matter was closed.

Just a year later, RB physicist Reina Ezaki, who was a researcher at SONY at the time, published a paper on the negative resistance characteristics of PN junctions, in which Reina Ezaki proved the theory of semiconductor tunneling effect with a diode made by himself.

And the research direction of this paper, the experimental arrangement, is almost exactly the same as that planned by Noyce.

In 1973, Reina Ezaki won the Nobel Prize in Physics for this paper, and Noyce missed out on a huge honor.

A cow man is a cattle man after all.

After the establishment of Fairchild Semiconductor, the opportunity for Noyce to make a name for itself came again.

At that time, Fairchild's process of manufacturing silicon transistors was as follows:

The purified silicon crystal is cut and polished into suitable silicon wafers, and after a series of chemical and physical processes such as diffusion, photography, masking, etching, hundreds of tiny transistors are generated on a silicon wafer, and then a large number of manpower is relied on to cut the silicon wafer, connect the wires with tweezers, and finally package them into independent transistor components, such as diodes, transistors, etc.

In January 1959, Neuss suddenly had an idea: "If you can make so many transistors on a single silicon wafer, why not make the relevant wiring, even capacitors and resistors, together?

This was Noyce's original idea of "integrated circuits", and as the president of Fairchild, he had every authority to use the company's resources to realize this idea soon.

However, the lethal laziness of Noyce's personality played a role, and perhaps it also had the negative effects of Shockley's strong leadership for several years, and he would never have rushed to invent without an urgent impulse.

So, he just jotted down the idea in his notebook and put it away.

It wasn't until two months later that TI announced a result that shocked the world, their engineer Jack Kilby, successfully integrated an oscillating circuit on a germanium wafer, and filed a patent application.

In this way, the right to invent integrated circuits fell to Kilby.

Noyce was blown up!

The urgency of the matter finally pushed him to take action, and it took only one month for Fairchild to launch a silicon-based integrated circuit that far superior to TI's kind of structure in terms of performance and manufacturability.

Since then, the two parties have been engaged in a protracted patent litigation dispute, and the court finally split the judgment in two, indirectly acknowledging that both Noyce and Kilby are the inventors of integrated circuits.

In 2000, Kilby won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of integrated circuits, but unfortunately by then, Noyce had already died, and Kilby humbly admitted in his acceptance speech:

"If Noyce is still around, he should share the honor with me."

The two Nobel Prizes were missed because of the deep-rooted inferiority in the character, which is the Achilles heel of Noyce.

It is precisely because of his understanding of Noyce's habits that Zhang Heng firmly believes that Noyce will never really take microprocessors seriously at this time.

It's like a boy who treats toys, even if he doesn't want to play for the time being, he doesn't want to let go, and he thinks that he may want to have fun in the future.

This time he came to Intel, and Plan A was to win the patent of the 8008 series, so as to cut off Intel's CPU road in the bud.

Of course, Intel can also start from scratch and develop CPUs again from other paths, they fully have this technical strength, but if they detour like that, they are destined to be left far behind by Daheng Technology.