The wafer factory is the highest crystallization of human technology, and the difficulty of manufacturing silicon wafers is no less than that of an aircraft carrier.

There are dozens of kinds of equipment alone, such as single crystal furnace, gas phase epitaxy furnace, oxidation furnace, magnetron sputtering table, chemical mechanical polishing machine, lithography machine, ion implanter, wire bonding machine, wafer dicing machine, wafer thinning machine, and a large number of high-precision equipment.

In fact, the lithography machine only accounts for a drop in the bucket. If all the equipment were to be produced in-house, no country could do it alone today.

In particular, the equipment had to be state-of-the-art at the time, and in order to make it all possible, it had to be procured from all over the world.

However, in many cases, you may not be able to buy it even if you have a check in your hand. From Huajing, to Huahong, and then to SMIC.

If a wafer factory takes one year from construction to production at the earliest, then more than half of it can be used just for the preliminary communication of buying equipment.

And more than half of this, basically 90% comes from qualification review. That is, if you want to buy these equipment, you must first pass the qualification review to determine whether you are qualified to buy it.

If you can't get the qualification, then I'm sorry, no matter how much money you have, no one will dare to sell it to you.

The reason why Chu Qing is in a hurry to invest so much energy in building a wafer factory at this time is because this is the time when the qualification review is the most relaxed.

Before that, there was the presence of Batumi, and after that, in July 1996, there would be a siege and interception by W Senna.

The time left for Qiangxin is only seven months in total. If you want to successfully break through, you can only seize this small window period.

United States, Seattle. Across from the office in the deep sea, there is a fab operations center. This name was given by Chu Qing, and it was actually a small villa.

The equipment procurement team led by Liang Mengsong is temporarily stationed here. At this moment, Liang Mengsong, Tan Hao, Zhang Rujing, Shen Lanpeng, Lin Maozhong, as well as more than a dozen engineers involved in equipment procurement, and a public relations team formed after coming to the United States, all of them are listed.

"Through my old relationship with Texas Instruments, I have contacted more than a dozen equipment suppliers. The basic preliminary purchase intentions have been reached, and as long as the audit qualification is obtained, normal commercial delivery can be basically carried out. Zhang Rujing has built a wafer factory in Texas for more than ten years.

From equipment to contacts, he is basically familiar with it. In his opinion, building a wafer factory for Qiangxin is just one more set of approvals from the review committee of the United States.

With the current attitude of Europe and the United States towards China, it is very easy to approve such an approval.

"At present, the approval has been submitted to the review committee by the commercial company here. However, if you want to pass all of them, you have to wait for the hearings of the three major departments of the United States to pass before the approval can be officially approved. The first hearing from the Ministry of Commerce, a month later. Tan Hao, who is mainly responsible for equipment procurement, first took out a piece of information, took over Zhang Rujing's words, and began to introduce the current progress.

After the failure of Batumi in 1994, the current commercial control of high-precision equipment is mainly audited by the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Finance and the Security Committee of the State Council.

In order to get the approval results as soon as possible, this time Qiangxin directly spent a lot of money to invite the top PR and Capitol Hill lobbyist companies in the United States.

Political lobbying is a very professional and mature industry in the United States. On K Street in Washington, D.C., a variety of think tanks, public relations firms and lobbying agencies are gathered.

Most of the political lobbyists are former members of Congress, administrative officials, and senior government officials. They are familiar with the ecology and rules of the National Assembly, and because of their work, they maintain good relationships with sitting legislators and government officials.

To put it bluntly, many times the job they hold is the middleman. And it is a middleman who can hit the nail on the head.

And this time, in order to be foolproof, Qiangxin, under Chu Qing's arrangement, directly hired the current deputy commander Gore, the former campaign adviser David Beckman.

Beckman, like Gore, is a staunch supporter of the Internet and the tech industry. So when he learned that a Xiangjiang company wanted to invest 800 million US dollars to build a wafer factory, he agreed to this public relations work without thinking about it.

Of course, in order to invite him to be a lobbyist, Qiangxin paid as much as $3 million for him and his team this time.

"I hate to admit it, but that's how efficient the bureaucracy is, and it's the quickest thing we can do when we submit an application and have our first hearing a month later." David Beckman, who was seated, shrugged helplessly.

Even if he has a good personal relationship with the current ruling group, he is not very easy to deal with such procedural issues.

"Mr. Beckman, we can understand that bureaucracy is like that, and they always like to complicate simple things." Zhang Rujing has lived in the United States for decades and has adapted to the market here.

"Yes, but don't worry, they won't be too embarrassed, whether it's the place of registration or the development plan, you meet the standards. If you were a genuinely British business, there would be no such audits at all. ”

"Of course, if your boss is willing to be our own, I think it will be easier to approve." The last sentence, David Beckman said to Shen Lanpeng.

In David Beckman's view, this lobbying can be said to be a very easy job. If it weren't for the fact that their boss was a Chinese, many procedures would not have been necessary at all.

"Mr. Beckman, you know, our boss is a young man who prefers to come on his own terms. If I could have the final say, I would never let him invest in the fab. It's a bottomless pit, and there's nothing good of it yet. As long as you have money, you can't buy anything. He didn't have to prove himself by making it himself. Shen Lanpeng, as Chu Qing's agent present, replied helplessly.

After a month-long public opinion guidance, Ye Maozhong and the others turned Chu Qing into a crazy genius young man.

He is outgoing, cheerful, humorous and likes to be boisterous. I know from several backgammon new product launches.

Thinking is imaginative, logical thinking is clear, and the personality is strong. Here, this kind of person is a typical genius personality.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are basically his kind of character. Crazy, extreme! has the previous examples, so when Ye Maozhong and the others create such a character for Chu Qing, they can easily be accepted by the people here.

Then release Chu Qing's motivation to create a strong core. The reason why he wanted to make his own chip was because of the dispute between him and Wanwan Lianhua over the VCD decoding chip, which made him feel that he had lost face.

It is said that he once let go of words that one day he would defeat Lianhua in the chip industry.

"Yes, he's too young, and success can sometimes be easy to get carried away." David Beckman recognized Shen Lanpeng's words very much, and when he took over this business, he also learned about Chu Qing and his company through his connections in the intelligence department.

They came to the conclusion that Chu Qing and Backgammon were the passionate works of a talented young man.

The biggest characteristic of geniuses and ordinary people is conceit. They often can't afford to fail in business.

People who also know about Lianhua's backstabbing of BBK at the beginning naturally believe that Chu Qinghao threw 800 million yuan to build a wafer factory in order to retaliate against Xiangjiang Lianhua's statement.

After all, in the land of the United States, there are not many genius entrepreneurs like him.

In their eyes, geniuses are often very paranoid. For example, Microsoft's Gates, they are all self-confident to extreme personalities.

With the publication of Gates' 1993 biography Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire.

Many people believe that Gates is the kind of character who will go crazy to find the field for one of his mistakes.

Therefore, as Chu Qing, who is also a genius, when he made great achievements and became the richest man in China, of course he would also find the field of his failure to prove his success.