Zhang Rujing may have been too excited and a little out of breath.

Huang Haojie hurriedly helped him to the chair next to him.

"Haha......" Zhang Rujing laughed with tears in his eyes: "Mr. Huang! Thank you very much for letting me join Galaxy Technology, I die without regrets, I can witness the chips of the Eastern Tang Kingdom stepping on the top of the world, and I have no regrets in this life! There are no regrets in this life! ”

"Dr. Zhang can fight for Galaxy Technology for at least another ten years, and we are still too early to set foot on the top of the world! This is just the pinnacle of electronic chips, and we still have quantum chips that have not yet conquered. Huang Haojie said as he smoothed Zhang Rujing's back.

"That's right, I also want to witness the bright moon on Mount Everest." Zhang Rujing's mood calmed down a little.

"Du Wei!" Huang Haojie shouted loudly.

"Mr. Huang!" Du Wei hurriedly stood up.

"Now your task is the most important, among the three chariots of Galaxy Group, Neutron Star has completed a large silicon wafer, and Galaxy Semiconductor has also successfully built a 5nm chip production line, now it depends on the design of your star map."

"I will definitely do my best to keep Xingtu Company from dragging its feet." Du Wei also felt a lot of pressure.

"In this way, you will design chips with Galaxy Semiconductor from now on, don't be afraid of spending money, tape out while designing, and keep trying, I don't believe that you can't improve your chip design capabilities." Huang Haojie commanded categorically.

"Yes, our Xingtu company will definitely live up to expectations." Of course, Du Wei knows that if this is done, the chip design ability will be improved the fastest.

After all, if you talk on paper on the computer, how can you have the effect of real knives and guns on the production line, and practice is the only criterion for testing the truth.

This is also the only way for Xingtu to improve its design capabilities to the world level, that is, to keep trying and tape-out.

Because on the design diagram of the computer, you can never know whether the circuit diagram is good or bad, and you don't know which designs are good and which are flawed.

This is also why in the production of semiconductors, the road of the strong Hengqiang, like Taijidian and Sanxin, can continue to find design defects on the production line, so as to achieve accurate improvement.

And those small factories can't afford to play this kind of thing at all.

Tape-out is the manufacture of chips through a series of process steps like an assembly line, which is called tape-out.

In the field of integrated circuit design, "tape-out" refers to "trial production", that is, after the circuit is designed, several dozens of pieces are produced for testing.

If the test passes, mass production will begin as such.

In the chip manufacturing process, there are generally two periods of time that can be called tape-out.

When the chip design company is engaged in the design, it finds that it can be modified somewhere to achieve better results, but it is afraid that such a modification will bring unexpected consequences to the chip, and if the chip is manufactured on a large scale according to such a problematic design, then the loss will be great.

Therefore, in order to test the success of the integrated circuit design, it is necessary to tape out, that is, from a circuit diagram to a chip, to check whether each process step is feasible, and to check whether the circuit has the performance and function we want.

If the tape-out is successful, chips can be manufactured on a large scale; Otherwise, we need to find out the reasons and optimize the design accordingly.

The reason why tape-out is very expensive at the beginning is because there are many processes that need to be verified at the beginning and the production volume is very small, a good chip, the traditional production method generally has to go through hundreds of processes, the production cycle is long, and the cost of tape-out will cost tens of millions or even hundreds of millions.

The reliability of chip manufacturing equipment is crucial, and there is still a long way to go for the development of new equipment to wait for customer certification, large-scale production and mass promotion.

Therefore, the R&D unit has a large investment cost in the early stage.

When the tape-out is mass-produced, all the process verification has been completed, all costs are effectively controlled, and the large-scale production will bring better economic benefits to the production unit.

Therefore, large-scale tape-out production is relatively much cheaper.

The tape-out of traditional chips is tens of millions to hundreds of millions, who dares to tape out for no reason, even if it is Taijidian and Sanxin, they are also adjusted while producing.

If it is a chip factory with no orders, you let him try trial production for no reason, and he will go bankrupt in minutes.

So there is no investment of tens of billions of Chinese dollars in semiconductors, just think about it.

For Galaxy Technology, the price of trial production tape-out is very low.

First, the raw materials for the production of chips are all produced by themselves. Second, the process production cost of Galaxy Semiconductor is very low, only about one-tenth of that of traditional chips.

In general, how much does traditional chip production cost?

It is very simple, the larger the scale, the lower the cost, the smaller the chip process, the lower the cost, if the chip process is 16 nanometers, 1 million pieces are generated, and the cost is 30 US dollars; Then the process is 7 nanometers, the production is 10 million pieces, and the production cost is 20 US dollars.

If it is to produce hundreds of millions of dollars, the cost can be reduced to 10 US dollars, or even lower.

According to the 8:20 pricing method of the pricing strategy of the internationally used low-profit chip design company, that is, when the hardware cost is 8, the pricing is 20.

Don't think this pricing is high, it's actually very low, Intel's general pricing strategy is 8:35, and AMD has reached 8:50 in history.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 845, which only broke out this year, is priced at about 70 US dollars, which means that the cost of Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 is about 15 US dollars.

The reason why Galaxy Semiconductor can reduce costs is that, on the one hand, raw materials such as silicon wafers are produced by itself;

On the other hand, because the new process does not require the use of auxiliary materials such as photoresist, which account for about 30% of the cost in chip production.

At the same time, because the production speed of the new process is very fast, this leads to a shorter production time, which means that the unit labor cost and electricity cost are reduced.

After all, lithography machines and the like, those lasers are used for a long time, and the electricity bill alone is enough.

The unit cost of Galaxy Semiconductor is 20~30 Chinese dollars, which is equivalent to between 3~4 US dollars.

Of course, this does not calculate the depreciation cost of equipment, Galaxy Semiconductor built such a production line, which can produce 23 million chips a year, which costs more than 50 million Chinese yuan in total, and the depreciation cost of the production line is evenly spread, which is equivalent to an additional cost of two yuan per chip.

In fact, the really expensive atomic imprinting machine, Galaxy Semiconductor people like to call it a chip machine, and the cost of one is about 120 million Chinese yuan.

In order to enhance the strength of Galaxy Semiconductor, 20 atomic imprinting machines alone were built, and a full 2.4 billion Chinese yuan was scattered.

However, if these are mass-produced, the cost will be lower and lower.

Therefore, the tape-out of Galaxy Semiconductor is about 100,000 Chinese yuan at a time, Huang Haojie does not believe that the tape-out is dozens or hundreds of times, and Xingtu Company has not made any progress.

Next, Huang Haojie has already discussed with Wang Bosi, Zhang Rujing and others, and asked Xingtu Company to improve the tape-out while designing.

At the same time, by March 2018, the scale of chip production lines will be increased to 20.

The other is the research and development of packaging and packaging equipment, because the world's strongest and largest packaging and testing company is East Island ASE Company, plus other packaging and testing companies in East Island, this field is monopolized by them.

Don't underestimate packaging, testing and packaging, these two links can sometimes be very costly.

Packaging is the stacking of substrates, cores, and heat sinks to form the CPU that everyone sees every day, and the packaging cost is the capital required for this process.

In general, the packaging cost accounts for about 5%-25% of the hardware cost, but the packaging cost of some IBM chips accounts for about half of the total cost, and it is said that the highest has reached 70%.

The test can identify the key characteristics of each processor, such as maximum frequency, power consumption, heat generation, etc., and determine the level of the processor, such as classifying a bunch of chips as: I5 4460, I5 4590, I5 4690, I5 4690K, etc., and then Intel can offer different prices according to different grades.

However, if the chip production is large enough, the cost of testing is negligible.

Therefore, Huang Haojie does not plan to let other companies package and test packaged chips, because Galaxy Semiconductor can do it by itself, and there is no need for others to make money.

What's more, the domestic packaging and testing company can't do it, do you want to send it across the ocean to the East Island packaging and testing? How much will the cost of this back and forth increase?

Instead of wasting money and time to find others to package and test, it is better to be self-reliant.