"I've carefully studied the UWB chip you designed, and it has a certain value, enough to support a small and medium-sized semiconductor company.

If you do it yourself from design to manufacturing, then there is no problem for semiconductor companies with hundreds of millions of revenues.

But from the market level, this segment is still too small. ”

On the eve of the ISSCC conference, Zhou Xin finally began to run to the laboratory often.

So much so that the other doctors under Hu Zhengming were very surprised, Zhou Xin belonged to them who had only heard of this person, and had never seen it.

Like this kind of big guy, everyone still wants to be familiar.

But when Zhou Xin came to the laboratory, most of the time he just said hello to them, and then went to Hu Zhengming's office to talk to him about some key issues alone.

After carefully studying Zhou Xin's UWB chip patent, Hu Zhengming talked to Zhou Xin: "It is undeniable that the Ultra-MIMO architecture developed by diversity antennas is more meaningful than the traditional cable method.

It also offers a greater range and higher link reliability. ”

After Hu Zhengming paused to drink water, Zhou Xin added: "And it has stronger radio frequency penetration." ”

Hu Zhengming continued: "But the problem is that the cost is also high.

The cost of UWB chips for home video IP networks will be much higher than that of traditional cable models. ”

Error-free information transmission is possible, even with high interference signals.

The only problem is that there are still too few application scenarios.

The 802.11 wireless standard was released in 1997, but the slower speeds and expensive hardware have been the biggest obstacles to its adoption.

None of the 802.11b standards that were popularized later have yet to be developed.

The 802.11 standard is the original standard of wifi, and the transmission rate is only 2Mbit/s, and after 802.11b, the rate is increased to 11Mbit/s.

When the 5GHz band is followed, the transmission rate will be further greatly increased, that is, 54Mbit/s.

In the era of mobile Internet, UWB chips have been widely used in the field of consumer electronics, such as the retrieval function of iPhone, which is based on the centimeter-level positioning achieved by UWB technology.

"In addition, there is a key problem, that is, UWB chips are military chips, and they cannot be used in the civilian field without FCC approval."

FCC: Federal Communications Commission.

Compared with the traditional UWB technology, the UWB dual-chipset technology designed by Zhou Xin increases the transmission distance, transmission rate and RF penetration.

In other words, the home WIFI system built based on UWB dual chipset can achieve more than 100Mbps data stream transmission.

Zhou Xin was dumbfounded, he didn't know that UWB technology in this era still needs to be licensed before it can be used in the civilian field.

However, he quickly thought of a solution: "There should be no relevant regulations in Huaguo, and we can build UWB in Huaguo." ”

Hu Zhengming nodded: "It should be possible, I don't know much about the laws and regulations of Huaguo Communications."

However, this thing is cost-effective, and current applications do not need such high-speed traffic.

There are no application scenarios in America, and there are no application scenarios in China. ”

Huaguo's backbone broadband expansion project only started in July 1998, and after the start, it was expanded to 155M, even if you use UWB technology to build a 100Mbps home network, the telecom side will not be able to support your high broadband demand.

To put it simply, the technology is too high-end to be applicable right now.

This is the generation gap brought about by the times, and there is no solution to the problem.

Hu Zhengming continued: "As I said before, there are hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, so you have to apply this technology to military radar."

But your Chinese identity dooms your product to not be trusted by Americacan.

But purely from a technical point of view, this is definitely a good enough technology.

It's just that his application scenarios have not been discovered yet. Hu Zhengming finally came to a conclusion.

Zhou Xin's first patent made Hu Zhengming amazing enough from the technical level.

It's just that the limitations of the application scenario make this technology temporarily unable to play its due value.

Zhou Xin was a little frustrated, no wonder Samsung would transfer this technology, it turned out that it couldn't find a large-scale application scenario.

Fortunately, this is not the only technology transferred by Samsung.

More importantly, with the vision of future generations, Zhou Xin can lead the research and development of some technologies by himself.

After the funds are abundant, Zhou Xin plans to set up a special integrated circuit research institute in Silicon Valley.

"Well, it's a pity for the technology."

"It's normal, it's a dilemma that researchers often encounter.

In many cases, the invention of Ling has no effect at the moment, and it may not be until a few years, more than ten years, or even decades later, that its real use is discovered.

For example, in 1966, Charles Kao experimentally verified the feasibility of optical fiber communication, and it was not until ten years later that the first optical fiber communication system was born.

This is the norm. Hu Zhengming comforted.

"In addition, you need to make a presentation at the ISSCC then, are you ready?"

"I've been prepared for a long time, this kind of debriefing case."

"Many of my friends in the field of integrated circuits are very interested in you, and your report will definitely be listened to by many people.

Don't embarrass me. ”

Hu Zhengming is completely joking, with Zhou Xin's achievements, even if he runs naked at the ISSCC site, he will be considered by everyone to be his true temperament.

"I'm ready, and I have some new ideas to share with you."

......

"Klassen, long time no see, this is my student Newman!"

San Francisco is the permanent venue for the ISSCC conference, and Hu Zhengming has been there many times, and being there is as familiar as returning home.

Since he has not yet published the most famous research result of his research career, the FinEFTP architecture, he is now only a well-known scholar.

Klassen got up and hugged Hu Zhengming: "Long time no see, the last time we met was when you came to the Netherlands to attend an academic conference."

Hello Newman, I'm Klassen, Theo Klassen, it's a pleasure to meet you, Chenming and I talk a lot about you in our emails.

He used to brag to me that he was a good student. ”

Klassen is an industry leader, who is already the chief technologist of Philips Semiconductors and previously the vice chairman of the Philips R&D center.

He has a high degree of attainment not only in the field of integrated circuits, but also in the field of automation, and he gave the opening speech at the IEEE Design Automation Conference a year later.

The ISSCC is attended by a large number of researchers from academia and industry, and is usually preceded by some additional agenda and presentations prior to the plenary session.

There are a large number of paper presentations and academic exchanges almost every day, as well as a small number of short courses.

"Hello, I am only a student in the field of integrated circuits, and I have a lot to learn from all senior practitioners."

Purely from the semiconductor field, the upstream and downstream enterprises in the industry, no matter how big or small, will not talk about the real thing.

They will even say something specious in order to mislead their competitors.

On the contrary, the academic community should be much more honest, and there will be a lot of dry goods every year.