The development status of Daming's semiconductor industry is the direction that Zhu Jingyuan directly focuses on.

Judy Plutonium was testing on a personal computer when she was trying to develop an online game independently.

In his office, Zhu Jingyuan receives and reviews reports on related industries every now and then.

There are wafer production plants, lithography machine production plants, semiconductor chip production plants......

There are also microprocessor design lines, ledger chip design lines, and miniaturized data warehouse design lines......

As well as data warehouse production plants, special display equipment factories, supporting external facilities factories, etc......

The construction of major factories in the semiconductor and microchip industries, as well as supporting factories for microchip computers, has been completed in the past few years.

In the past two years, we have been continuously optimizing the process and successively coming up with products that meet the design goals.

Zhu Jingyuan believes that there are usually two most important driving forces for how to make a technology, or an industry, be able to quickly realize and upgrade.

One is the abundant financial and resource support and hard demand, which usually comes from the national court, the military and scientific research institutions.

The other is a relatively adequate market competition environment, which is usually a wide range of market demand and competitive environment.

Moreover, the role of the former is mainly embodied in pioneering and tackling key problems, and the main role of the latter is reflected in the process of promotion and popularization.

Zhu Jingyuan remembers that in many popular science and even exam questions in his previous life, the answer to the question of "the world's first microprocessor" was usually considered to be Intel 4004.

But this is actually a wrong answer, or rather a loose question and answer.

The 4004 in 1971 was actually the first "commercial" microprocessor, that is, the microprocessor that was publicly sold on the civilian market.

If you want to examine this knowledge point, you should ask it like this to be accurate.

The real first practical microprocessor chip was actually the chip of the central air data computer on the F14 fighter jet.

The F14 fighter began to be developed in 1967 and made its first flight in 1970, apparently earlier than the 4004.

At the same time, the earliest microchip production has a process from the laboratory state to mass production and popularization.

To some extent, microchips in the laboratory can be said to be "hand-rubbed".

Due to the natural structural defects of the early contact lithography machines, the chip yield rate at that time was only a pitiful 10%.

And in the process of production, a large amount of lithography mask is consumed.

As a result, the price of the chips produced is unusually high, usually starting at two or three hundred dollars.

The U.S. Air Force develops and popularizes missile systems in this era, and the missile's seeker uses a large number of microchips, and the key is that they are all disposable.

So the U.S. Air Force paid for someone to specialize in researching and improving the chip production process, and developed projection lithography technology.

It solves the biggest pain point of the step-by-step lithography machine, and increases the chip yield rate to more than 70%.

At the same time, the number of photolithography masks consumed is reduced by several times.

Correspondingly, the final production cost of chips of the same scale has also dropped directly from two or three hundred dollars to twenty or thirty dollars.

With such a cheap cost, microchips have a chance to be popularized in the civilian market.

The Ming court now has a very similar need.

The Taixi War stopped, the Ming Dynasty seemed to have truly unified the world, and Zhu Jingyuan began a large-scale disarmament.

However, Zhu Jingyuan did not abolish the army, nor did he stop the development of new weapons and equipment.

The four armies of the Ming Dynasty are fully equipped and upgraded missile systems, and the demand for microchips is also soaring rapidly and comprehensively.

In accordance with the instructions of the Ming Emperor and the actual needs of the Ming Air Force and Navy, the Ministry of Ordnance of the Ming Dynasty is beginning to develop a third-generation fighter similar to the F14.

The fighter will be equipped with a specialized computer and early phased array radio detection equipment.

The accumulation of a large number of new technologies on the new record means that a large number of semiconductor chips are needed.

The upcoming launch of a geosynchronous communication satellite with a practical shelf, and the communication and control equipment of the supporting launch vehicle.

Semiconductor microchips that are powerful enough, consume low enough power, and weigh low enough are also needed.

Yingtian Microchip's hand-rubbed 83 chips, as well as a small amount of hand-rubbed 162 chips, have been cooperating with relevant departments to do corresponding tests.

The 162 chip will be the computer core of a new generation of aircraft and combat vehicles, as well as warships.

The chips needed for the missile's seeker should be specially developed on the basis of the 83 chip, a low-cost mass production chip.

Because this thing is really a one-time suicide part......

On the basis of such actual needs, Zhu Jingyuan used his original semiconductor knowledge to guide the Ministry of Industry to formulate the layout of the semiconductor industry.

From the second half of the 15th year of Ankang, it has taken more than five years to gradually complete the current complete set of semiconductor industry chain.

On March 15 of the sixth year of the Great Duke, Wang Lai, the director in charge of industry in the Jiuqing Middle School of the Ming Dynasty, came to Zhu Jingyuan's office.

Report the stage results of Daming semiconductor industry construction.

Report the news of the initial completion of testing of microchip computers and ask whether to start the official deployment of microchip computers and the Internet.

After reading Wang Lai's simple report, Zhu Jingyuan asked him to organize a centralized report and reward meeting.

It was held directly in the Daming Society under His Royal Highness Fengtian.

The main equipment, main finished products and related technical documents of the entire semiconductor industry are all officially stored in the Daming Society.

Wang Lai didn't dare to slack off, and immediately went back to organize.

After 20 days of non-stop preparation, the time was finally scheduled for April 5.

Sikong Wanglai himself, as well as the relevant departments of the Ministry of Industry and the Ministry of Ordnance, as well as the main personnel of the relevant factories and design firms, were all on the spot.

Wang Lai also arranged for a group of grassroots officials and craftsmen with special contributions or talents to participate.

Obviously, there is nothing wrong with this arrangement.

It also gave Judy Plutonium, who was trained in Yingtian Microchip, the opportunity to participate in the debriefing ceremony.

At nine o'clock in the morning on April 5, the doors of the Shejian warehouse opened.

The ceremonial personnel of the Ministry of Industry and the Ministry of Rites jointly presided over the relevant equipment and technical documents of the semiconductor industry and sent them to the social warehouse in turn according to the process.

In this process, Wang Lai and the personnel representatives of the corresponding institutions jointly introduced the situation to Zhu Jingyuan, the emperor of the Ming Dynasty.

The first thing to be put into storage is the foundation of the semiconductor industry chain, silicon wafers and supporting production equipment and technical documents.

The first step in a silicon wafer factory is to refine a silicon pillar that meets the purity standard.

The crystal pillars are then cut into thin silicon wafers and polished to a smoothest and smoothest surface to meet the needs of high-precision lithography.

For this purpose, the factory has specially developed passivation slurry and designed special high-precision motors and grinding equipment.

Once the flatness of the wafer has been created, the subsequent task of the fab is to increase the size of the individual wafers and reduce the overall wafer unit cost.

The products that have been sent to the warehouse today include the 80-millimeter wafers that were originally completed, and the 120-millimeter wafers, which have just recently completed trial production.

After silicon, it is the most critical tool in the entire industrial chain - lithography machine and supporting equipment.

Zhu Jingyuan has memories of his previous life and is very sensitive to the lithography machine industry, so he has also paid special attention to it.

The production of high-precision lithography machines in the 21st century was, of course, one of the most cutting-edge technology industries in the world at that time.

But lithography machines also have levels and different types of uses.

Only a small number of cutting-edge lithography machines are used in the top semiconductor industry.

SOCs for the production of the latest mobile phones, the latest generation of computer processors, and high-end GPU chips, among others.

Most lithography machines are actually producing chips with low processes.

For example, router chips, various smart home appliance chips, sound decoding chips, on-board computer chips, flash memory chips, and so on.

Even the latter is the main force, and the product output is much higher than the former.

Lithography fabs that are catching up with the most advanced processes spend a significant amount of money on the latest lithography machines for the latest process implementations and improvements.

Lithography factories with mature technology only need to continue to receive orders for production.

AMD's original lithography factory, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, was about to go out of business because there was no profit when it produced processing and graphics cards for AMD.

After breaking away from AMD and working full-time as a chip foundry, he has become more and more nourishing.

The main thing is that there is no need to invest money in R&D.

The lithography machine industry was not so sophisticated from the beginning.

When the industry was just starting out, there was no particularly high entry threshold.

After all, when accuracy is low, a lot of things are easy to say.

8086 is a three-micron chip, and you can even see the line with a microscope, and you can directly draw and imitate it by hand.

As long as you spend money and energy, you can slowly rub it out.

However, this model is limited to the laboratory state, and the real hand rubbing is not only ridiculously inefficient, but the key is that the speed and yield rate are not guaranteed at all.

Zhu Jingyuan did something similar in the 70s in his previous life.

If you want to be truly practical, you must take the road of standardization and mass production, and you must have a supporting industrial and technical system to produce a usable lithography machine.

And then the process of hand-carving seals by the master was turned into mechanized automatic printing in the industrial age.

The process was later abandoned for some reason.

The Ming of this world has preliminarily completed this process in the past five years.

First, an early contact lithography device that was relatively easy to implement was made.

Although the chip yield rate of contact lithography is low and the unit cost is high, experimental chips can be produced as soon as possible, which is convenient for design and improvement.

Then, while testing and refining the chip design, we continued to develop a full-fledged projection lithography machine.

It wasn't until the fifth year of Dagong that Daming's projection lithography machine was finally finalized, and the production process of two to four microns can now be realized.

In the next few years, a one-micron production process will be progressively realized.

In the history of Zhu Jingyuan's previous life, the Intel 8086 processor in the seventies was a three-micron production process.

The Intel 80386 and 80486 processors in the mid-to-late eighties were all made with a one-micron process.

The working condition of the lithography machine is similar to that of the printing press.

After having a lithography machine, we can build the real core of the industrial chain - semiconductor chip factory.

Therefore, after two generations of lithography machines, what was reported to enter the social inventory file was a batch of produced chips and corresponding design documents.

The most important of these products is, of course, microprocessor chips.

The Type 83 processor uses a four-micron process, and the Type 162 processor uses a two-micron process.

The overall performance of the Sixteen Twelve slightly exceeds that of the Intel 8086.

Of course, there is basically no similarity between the two processors in terms of architecture.

Zhu Jingyuan has not seen the design drawings of the 8086, and he does not remember the design details of the second processor.

Sixteen and two are things developed by the craftsmen of the Ming Dynasty.

Coupled with the underlying logic of Daming's computer, it is very different from the computer in the previous life.

Therefore, according to the typical processor classification standard of Zhu Jingyuan's previous life, the processor of sixteen and two cannot even be simply classified into a certain system.

It is significantly different from the complex instruction set of the intel 86 series, nor can it be regarded as a reduced instruction set of the RISC system.

The overall look is more like a blend of characteristics from both directions.

Of course, this is the result of Zhu Jingyuan's view of this new treatment with the perspective of his previous life and the standards of his previous life.

The microprocessor in this world has just been formed, and the application of microprocessor has not yet been rolled out.

There is no convincing consensus on how the instruction set of a microprocessor should be designed.

There is also no habit of distinguishing the types of processor instruction sets in a complex and streamlined way.

However, in Zhu Jingyuan's memory, in the development of the processor instruction set that he knew, there seemed to be a situation where different instruction sets borrowed from each other.

Both Intel and AMD are theoretically complex instruction sets, but they have long been borrowing from RISC.

The ARM system, which should theoretically belong to a simple instruction set, is becoming more and more complex as the market needs to become more and more complex.

ARM's instruction standard length may not be kept.

Daming is now function-oriented, not clearly pursuing the limit in a certain direction, and groping to build its own instruction set system, which seems to be the same way.

Therefore, Zhu Jingyuan did not directly interfere with the development of the processor.

The chips that are placed in the warehouse after the microprocessor are account chips with the same process, that is, the DRAM memory that Zhu Jingyuan was familiar with in his previous life.

In the current stage of computer development, the importance of the account chip is much higher than that of later generations.

Intel actually started with memory.

Daming was responsible for the factory that produced account chips, and completed the mass production of 66,536 character account chip in the fifth year of Dagong.

According to the 1024 base system, it is 64K.

However, in the previous life, a byte was eight bits, and a hexagram in the Ming Dynasty was a sixteen hexagram, and this 64K is equivalent to 128K to some extent.

Behind the ledger chip is a miniaturized "data warehouse", that is, a shrunken mechanical hard disk.

Mechanical hard disk is basically a pure mechanical structure, is a product that eats the precision of industrial production, and now Daming has an advantage in this regard.

In accordance with Zhu Jingyuan's reminder, the Ministry of Industry designed a flight head using the principle of aircraft wings, which greatly reduced the size and weight of the hard disk per unit capacity.

The maximum capacity of the nano-sized hard disk of the safe can already achieve more than 120 million words, that is, 128M.

However, the design of the personal microchip small personal computer is limited in size, and for the time being, it only has a hard disk of 16.77 million words, which is equivalent to 16M.

Behind the hard drive are the monitor, chassis, motherboard, keyboard, mouse and other supporting equipment.

As well as combining them to form a whole device, a microchip personal minicomputer.

The introduction of the minicomputer was handed over to Judy Plutonium by Wang Lai.

Inside the warehouse, there is a hall dedicated to storing and displaying microchip computer equipment, next to the platform where the computer is placed.

Zhu Jingyuan smiled, watched his son open the side panel of the case, and introduced the computer situation with some nervousness and excitement.

For the design of this main chassis, Zhu Jingyuan has put forward a few simple hints or requirements.

The finished chassis, or the shape of the computer's main unit, is very similar to the larger full-tower chassis of later generations.

On the outside, it looks like a rectangular iron box standing up.

However, the internal structure of this chassis is obviously different from the host in Zhu Jingyuan's previous life.

Zhu Jingyuan's typical computer chassis in his previous life was originally designed in the way of lying down.

The motherboard inside the chassis lies on the bottom surface, and the other functional versions are vertically plugged into the motherboard, and the force of the whole system is very stable.

At the same time, the chassis is lying down, just enough to place a huge CRT display.

But after the popularity of LCD monitors, no one can tolerate a lying down case that alone occupies a huge amount of desktop space.

Therefore, many manufacturers naturally put the chassis up and put it on the edge of the table or under the table.

There was no problem with this approach at first, and the early graphics cards and radiators and other external devices were relatively lightweight.

Even if it is mounted on the motherboard, it will not affect the motherboard.

But as the times evolved, the power of processors and graphics cards continued to skyrocket, and the weight of heatsinks and graphics cards also increased.

Later, there were even cases where the graphics card and heatsink were larger than the motherboard.

As a result, the motherboard is bent by the graphics card and heatsink.

There are also cases where the graphics card's own weight bends its own circuit board.

Due to the huge stock of personal computers, the scale of related industries is also unusually large, involving countless accessory manufacturers.

The structure of the computer case, which has been in use for decades, has never been updated.

Zhu Jingyuan expected this speechless result, and asked for the chassis design to be established from the beginning.

At the same time, the motherboard is not allowed to stand up, and it should continue to lie flat inside the case.

As a result, the motherboard became a narrow and long style, and the interior of the chassis was designed in the form of a building with three floors.

The top layer is installed with a motherboard lying flat before and after, and functional chips and plug-in boards such as processors, account meter chips, and display chips are vertically installed on the motherboard.

In the future, the graphics card will become larger, and the processor heatsink will become larger, and the default vertical installation method will continue to be maintained, which can stalemate the possibility of their deformation.

At present, the middle layer is all hard disk layer, which occupies the largest weight proportion of the entire host.

The lowest level is the space where the power supply and other functions are installed.

Due to the current production process of various parts is relatively low, especially the scale of hard disks is extremely large.

The height of the entire chassis reached one meter, the width of the front and rear reached eighty centimeters, and the overall lateral thickness was also thirty-two centimeters.

This is much larger than the full-tower chassis in Zhu Jingyuan's previous life.

However, with the continuous improvement of the process, the size of this chassis should also be reduced simultaneously.

(End of chapter)