The blade is the core component of aviation equipment, and the processing and manufacturing technology of the blade reflects the comprehensive level of a country's metallurgical materials, processing equipment, power design and process technology.

If Ling Shizhe wants to engage in aero engines, blade technology is a difficult task that must be done his homework. The miniature turbojet engine used in the model airplane, the exhaust gas turbocharger, these things all use blades or impellers.

If Ling Shizhe can't make it himself, then they can only buy it from the West at a high price, and a large part of the profits will be taken by them, and Ambrera can only earn some labor costs.

In addition, the performance of an aero engine is largely dependent on the level of design and manufacture of the blade profile.

The blade is a typical free-form surface part, and its surface shape and manufacturing accuracy directly determine the propulsion efficiency of the aircraft engine, and the processing method of the blade is helpful to the machining accuracy and efficiency of this type of part.

Aero engine blade manufacturing technology is huge, any country in the world is rigorous export, such as the T-30 engine Yankees although they gave the technology, but the blade technology did not give us, even if we want to produce, we need to import blades from them, and this Yankee is just a place for us.

The big blade plan proposed by Alison and others is, to put it bluntly, to make steam turbine blades for them.

In addition to the need for blades for aero engines, turbine generators also need various types of blades, and the blades of steam turbines are much lower technically than those of aero engine blades.

After World War II, with the rapid development of the global economy, people's demand for electricity has reached an unprecedented height, and power generation equipment has developed rapidly, and steam turbines are one of them.

Under normal circumstances, the processing of steam turbine blades is generally provided by customers with technical drawings of products, and what the factory should do is to manufacture qualified finished products with high efficiency and high quality according to the drawings.

After a long time, Ling Shizhe put the report on the table, closed his eyes and thought for a while, and asked: "The company's Seiko department has two mechanical processing plants, one is a processing plant in the United States, and the other is a processing plant in Hong Kong. I remember that the machine shop in the United States, before we bought it, seemed to have done steam turbine blade processing and manufacturing, right? ”

Alison said: "That's right, boss, they used to do blade manufacturing and processing, and then they didn't do it, but we thought they had this technical foundation, so we came up with the blade OEM plan." ”

"Why didn't they do it, you must know that the OEM profit of blades is still quite lucrative, why not do it?"

Foster interjected: "I'll tell you this, I asked the previous boss of this factory, and he told me that although they can make blades, because the manufacturing process of blades is technically demanding, different customers and different blade varieties have different technical requirements, so the manufacturing process of the blade factory must continue to innovate." In fact, most of the work in the blade factory is not to make products, but to experiment with new manufacturing processes.

And this requires a lot of investment in research and development, and this factory is only a small and medium-sized machinery processing factory, not so much financial resources to invest, so it has always been doing small steam turbine blades, but with the rapid development of large steam turbines, and the rise of the Japanese steam turbine industry, the market demand for small ordinary steam turbine blades has been greatly reduced, plus their artificial manufacturing costs are much higher than those in Japan, so even if there are orders, those electrical manufacturing companies will hand over the blades to Japan to do, In this way, they can't receive the orders of small turbines, and they can't do the blade orders of large steam turbines, so they have to change careers in the end, but it will not go smoothly after changing careers, otherwise they will not be merged by us. ”

A steam turbine is a rotating power machine that converts the energy of steam into mechanical work. Also known as steam turbines. It is mainly used as a prime mover for power generation, and can also directly drive various pumps, fans, compressors and ship propellers.

"You mean, take advantage of Hong Kong's much lower labor than Japan's, and pick up the blade OEM business again?"

"Yes boss, after the mechanical processing plant in the United States was merged by us, most of the workers there did not leave, those workers and engineers have made blades, with them as the technical backbone, in Hong Kong to train a group of qualified blade industry workers for us.

I asked, this small steam turbine blade processing and manufacturing technology is not very difficult, first start from a simple start, and then we increase investment in the research of large steam turbine blade processing technology, step by step climb the science and technology tree, and finally in the manufacture of aviation power blades, in this way, that is, the accumulation of technology and to the aero engine sector to provide research and development funds, forming a virtuous circle. ”

"At that time, we can also do it with aviation powder metallurgy roulette." Andy Grove added.

Ling Shizhe thought for a while and said, "The idea is good, but is there an order?" ”

Alison replied: "Boss, although small steam turbines are no longer needed in Europe and the United States, there is still a certain market in Southeast Asian countries, although the list is not very much, but it should be enough for the company, and small turbines even Japan itself does not want to do, they are engaged in large and super-large steam turbines, Japan has a small land area, and needs to make enough space for the production of large steam turbines, if we take over they will be happy, small steam turbine blades they can no longer look at, We can also buy some technology. ”

Ling Shizhe deduced it carefully, and when he saw that there were no loopholes, he agreed: "In this way, next to the jet and propulsion laboratory, leave a piece of land to build a blade processing plant, and then set up a blade research and application laboratory." ”

"Okay boss, I'll arrange it myself." Foster said.

Then there were some other issues that were discussed, and the meeting ended after two hours.

Alison did not stay in Hong Kong that night, but left by plane that night, this time he went to the aircraft machinery processing factory in the United States, since he decided to start the blade production plan, he had to rush over to coordinate the preliminary preparations, the work was very busy and he did not have time to grind.

Aircraft companies and technical personnel in aviation power are recruited from North America and Europe, and most of them are Chinese.

In fact, most of the Chinese were engaged in scientific research in Europe and the United States, when China was poor and weak, bullied by the Western powers, people with lofty ideals throughout China were looking for China's road to a strong country, and at that time put forward various slogans, such as rejuvenating the country through science and education, rejuvenating the country through industry, rejuvenating the country through medicine, and rejuvenating the country through revolution, and rejuvenating the country by aviation was also one of the slogans at that time.

Under various slogans, a large number of aspiring young people studied abroad to learn advanced science and technology from developed countries in the West, and many Chinese were involved in the emerging aviation industry in the West at that time. For example, Feng Ru, a well-known aircraft expert in China.

After the founding of New China, a considerable number of Chinese aviation scientists working in Europe and the United States returned to the motherland, but there were many who continued to stay in Europe and the United States, and they did not return because they had great misgivings about the mainland.

They are industrious and industrious, the middle force of European and American scientific research, but they are treated unfairly because of the color of their skin.

This time, Ling Shizhe came to Europe and the United States to recruit people in the name of China Aircraft Industry Company, and the main target of recruitment was this group of Chinese scientists, and the Chinese people heard that Ambrera Company had established the China Aircraft Industry Company in Hong Kong to build Chinese's own aircraft, and many people joined in.

Ling Shizhe instructed the recruiters of the Ministry of Personnel: "Those Chinese scientists are wary of the motherland, after all, the batch that returned to China before have been rectified, this time you go and tell them that we are a Hong Kong aircraft company, not a mainland aircraft company, there is no messy political struggle, and there are no various glass ceilings in Europe and the United States, they can come boldly with confidence, we all welcome it, if they are not satisfied, we will not stop them from leaving." ”

Because the headquarters and laboratory of the aircraft company and the family area are under construction, a large part of the scientists can only temporarily stay in the European and American branches, and after the relevant infrastructure construction is completed, they will come to Hong Kong in batches and batches, and then the aircraft company and the aviation power department will begin to officially operate.

In January of the 73rd year, after more than half a year of intense construction, the first phase of the monocrystalline silicon industrial park was completed and put into trial production.

Originally, the industrial park was planned to be built in Hong Kong, but because the production of monocrystalline silicon, the silane preparation method, was extremely dangerous in the production process, so the British government insisted that Ambrera must relocate the factory away from the crowds, and finally chose to set up the monocrystalline silicon industrial park on Lamma Island.

Ling Shizhe did not come to attend the groundbreaking ceremony of monocrystalline silicon, this is only a trial production, according to the plan three months later, the official start of large-scale production, when the day, he will come to cut the ribbon for the factory.

The 24-inch wafer was the first to supply the chip factory in Canada, and the transformation of the chip factory has been completed.

Computer camera is people's entertainment consumer goods, there is no technical content, but there are many people who can't stand the demand, in the previous life when the point-and-shoot camera and the digital camera alternated, that was the last glory of the point-and-shoot camera, the global production and sales of point-and-shoot cameras, it broke through the one billion mark, from here you can see how huge his consumption base is.

In the following few years, digital cameras quickly replaced point-and-shoot machines and became the new darlings of the market, and the production and sales volume far exceeded that of point-and-shoot machines, reaching an annual production and sales of more than 2.5 billion units.

Therefore, at this time, Ling Shizhe does not need to worry about the insufficient operating rate of the chip factory, build, build a new factory, this is the main problem that Ambrera is currently facing, not only the Canadian factory is under construction, the Hong Kong chip factory is also under construction, Ling Shizhe plans to achieve the goal of Hong Kong's annual chip output of 2 billion, and Canada to achieve the goal of producing 1 billion chips.

At that time, Ling Shizhe will not build a new factory to continue to expand production capacity, and he needs to consider how to ensure the operating rate.

The semiconductor production industry can be roughly divided into two models: one company undertakes the entire process from design, manufacturing to sales, which is called IDM or vertical integration model; The fabless semiconductor company + wafer foundry model that separates the complex manufacturing process from each other

With the rapid improvement of the integration of large-scale integrated circuits, the pressure of investment in both design and manufacturing is also increasing.

The former is better, after all, it is mainly based on intellectual investment, and the latter needs to rely on real money to smash out a physical factory, and in addition to being responsible for production, it often has to undertake the later work of assembling, testing, packaging, etc. of the manufactured chips, and even includes the scientific research and improvement of its entire process.

In the 21st century, wafer processing is no longer an absolutely blocked technology, but in order to build a large-scale wafer factory with the top process, it often needs to invest tens of billions of dollars, and the lithography machine used in the lithography step alone in the entire production process is sold for more than 15 million US dollars.

This kind of burden is not something that ordinary companies can afford, if they want to recover the cost after completion, they can only start work desperately and make full use of the production capacity, but uncontrollable factors such as market changes and supply and demand imbalances are always unavoidable, and the wafer fab capacity is often unable to be filled, and the huge depreciation cost is increasing the operational risk without stopping.

If something unlucky happens again, it will be even more tragic. Samsung's factory, for example, has suffered a power supply accident. Millions of dollars were casually wasted.

Motorola is also going to spin off its semiconductor division to become Freescale by $200 million. This is due to the cost caused by the inability to fully utilize the production capacity.

In 2009, it also spun off its manufacturing division and accepted investment from Abu Dhabi Venture Capital in the Middle East to establish GLBLFNDRIES.

In 2014, IBM also paid GLOBALFOUNDRIES $1.5 billion and patent rights to take over its own wafer manufacturing equipment due to long-term losses in its own fab and relatively backward manufacturing technology.

As for Japan's six major semiconductors, they have long been spun off by the parent company. and joined one another in vertical and horizontal directions.

The only thing that can play with the IDM model is Intel, which occupies a monopoly position in the market, and even Samsung has to provide foundry services for processors designed by Apple for IPNE and IPD.

Factoryless semiconductor company + wafer foundry model is the general trend of the future development of the semiconductor industry, although Ling Shizhe can build a factory to expand production capacity, but if it is not controlled, what if the operating rate is insufficient in the future? Therefore, he set an upper limit of 3 billion pieces, and if the production capacity is still insufficient in the future, he will start to release the chip processing technology and support several third-party foundries to let them do OEM for Ling Shizhe.