What Pony Ma, who was full of ambition when he returned to the apartment, did not know that the Matrix prototype he saw in Zhou Xin's office was one of the few prototypes.

Moreover, the chip built into Matrix is not the final product, and the final chip does not even have a sample, and the chip of the Matrix prototype uses a handheld computer chip.

The chip is still on the drawings, and in order to design the Matrix chip as soon as possible, Guan Jianying has not stopped since the end of New Year's Day and the beginning of Shenhai.

Because Zhou Xin is in San Francisco, the time difference causes Guan Jianying to sometimes have to reply to emails at night.

Compared with Silicon Valley, Huaguo's lack of talents in the chip field is what makes Guan Jianying feel the most helpless.

If he is short of money, he can apply to Zhou Xin, electricity, network, land, and water resources, all of which can meet his requirements. Only in terms of talent, whether it is chip design or lithography machine, it is too difficult to find the right person.

Unlike SMIC, which is a chip foundry, SMIC can poach a large number of people from bends.

At this point in time, Wanwan is not good at chip design and lithography machines, lithography machines are slightly better, and they can poach people from neon, plus Shenhai Microelectronics has a small number of engineers who have engaged in lithography machines, and they can get started by absorbing cutting-edge technology.

Chip design is really not good, IC design engineers are concentrated in Americon and Goryeo, Goryeo is mainly Samsung has a certain say in the field of chip design.

These people can't dig at all.

With more than 20 years of chip design experience in Silicon Valley, Guan Jianying reluctantly recruited more than a dozen chip design engineers from Silicon Valley, with work experience ranging from three to fifteen years.

But this manpower is far from enough, after he knows Zhou Xin's development goals for Xinxin Semiconductor.

Zhou Xin and Guan Jianying talked about Xinxin Semiconductor's short-term design and handheld computer-like chips, and then slowly expand to other fields after this business is done.

The market for handheld computers is small compared to ordinary computers, which also leads to the fact that there are few players in chip design in this field.

There are only a few Intel, Texas Instruments and Samsung, and IBM, Apple, and AMD have all tried to design handheld computer chips, but in the end they have not been recognized by the market.

Because the manufacturers who are still insisting on making handheld computer chips are all large manufacturers, it is difficult to poach people from large factories, and they are still recruited to work in China.

As for why not set up a R&D center in Silicon Valley, and the office location is in Silicon Valley, it is much more convenient to poach people.

If you want to poach people from big factories such as Intel, Texas Instruments, and Samsung, or from Silicon Valley to Zhangjiang, the difficulty coefficient is about 100, and if the office is located in Silicon Valley, the difficulty coefficient will drop to 80.

Guan Jianying has mentioned that it will be divided into two steps, first set up a R&D center in Silicon Valley, adopt the model of two places and two centers, and slowly move the focus of R&D to Zhangjiang in the future.

In the first three to five years, it will definitely be dominated by R&D centers in Silicon Valley.

This plan was rejected by Zhou Xin, in Zhou Xin's view, Samsung's chip design plan in his hand is enough to support around 2010.

Ten years is enough time to cultivate a capable chip design team, and it took less than ten years for Huawei's HiSilicon Kirin to evolve the K3V2 into a 980.

Not to mention that Matrix can also take advantage of the first-mover advantage of mobile phone chips.

If the R&D center is located in Silicon Valley, what is the difference between Xinxin Semiconductor and other multinational giants?

Microsoft and Intel also have R&D centers in China, and these multinational giants are still marginalized after two decades of R&D centers in China.

Zhou Xin knew that as long as he opened an opening for Guan Jianying and asked him to set up a R&D center in Silicon Valley, then he would definitely not be interested in Zhang Jiang's team, which was the inevitability of human nature.

It's like when Tencent firmly grasped most of the traffic entrances in China in the future, and counted the money on the credit book, even the top product manager team in the past no one cared about the user experience anymore.

KPIs replace user experience.

It's human nature that no one will do a difficult thing when the short-term benefits of doing simple things are greater than the short-term gains of doing difficult things.

In addition to this matter, Zhou Xin almost unconditionally satisfied Guan Jianying for other things.

Keying Ying is a living fossil in the field of chip design, and knows all kinds of technical data well.

After knowing that Zhou Xin's goal is to use a handheld computer, he will put the R&D team in Zhangjiang, and claim that there will be no revenue and profit requirements in three years.

Guan Jianying changed a request:

"Newman, the needs of the handheld computer and the desktop computer are very different, the handheld computer is limited by the battery capacity, and the handheld computer has always been positioned as an office tool.

Handheld computers don't need to consider entertainment, so unlike the core demand for chips, which is performance, mobile phone chips need to consider battery life and power consumption more.

I recommend considering Apple's Newton Pocket Computer, which is an absolute success product even though Apple has discontinued the Newton Pocket Computer.

The failure of Apple's other business lines has made it impossible for them to continue to invest in handheld computers, and they have had to cut this product line.

From a purely chip design and product design perspective, I think Newton is very good.

We can buy the patent for the XScale chip from Intel, which is based on the ARM architecture, which is the chip used by Apple.

A full set of patents is not necessary, and I can't afford it, Intel will definitely open my mouth, and I have a certain degree of confidence in buying patent licensing.

XScale was not taken seriously within Intel, their best partner Newton discontinued, and other brands of PDAs gradually turned to Texas Instruments and Samsung's PDA chips.

Intel's senior management has always been divided on mobile chips, and there are often voices internally that they want to package and sell the mobile chip business, so if we just buy the license, the price will not be very high, and the probability of them agreeing is very high.

Just the patent licensing of the XScale series of chips can play a role in training the team, and I think the money is well spent. ”

Zhou Xin agreed without the slightest hesitation.

Guan Jianying continued: "Because of our entire engineering team, there are only 15 engineers who are willing to go back to Zhangjiang with me to start a business, and in my initial engineering team of 16 people, only 5 people have experience in mobile chip design.

Among these five people, only one and a half focus on mobile chip design, and I am the half.

Why buy Intel's XScale chip patent license, because almost all handheld computers now adopt the ARM architecture, which is quite different from the previous architecture adopted by our engineering team.

Compared with the x86 architecture, the power consumption and cost of the Arm architecture are lower, even if it is difficult to compare with the x86 architecture in terms of performance, the handheld computer still chooses the ARM architecture, and as a result, the ARM architecture chip performs very generally in the personal computer market.

The architecture of the XScale chip is StrongARM, which is a RISC processor that supports the WinCE3.0-PocketPC system, which means that it can be a good bridge to switch from other chips to ARM architecture chips, and can train the team. ”

In the end, Xinxin Semiconductor obtained the patent authorization of XScale at a price of 20 million US dollars.

Intel once took the lead in handheld computer chips, and later developed mobile phone chips along the XScale technology route, which is the second largest smartphone chip in the industry after Texas Instruments' mobile phone chips.

In the end, Intel sold the entire technology to Marvell for a low price of $600 million.

This is also human nature, it is too cool to make money on personal computers, and I can't look at the benefits brought by mobile chips at all, so it is better to sell them for cash to make the company's financial report look better.

Guan Jianying, who returned to China with XScale's technical data, patent authorization and 15 engineers, was apprehensive and excited.

During Shenhai's days, Lin Benjian's progress was faster than Guan Jianying's, not only because of talent, but also because he bought a complete set of lithography machine technology from Nikon.

The lithography machine based on the most advanced 150nm process is two generations behind, that is, the lithography machine with the 220nm process.

The first prototype of Xinxin Semiconductor has been built, and the prototype is jointly tested at Hua Hong Semiconductor.

For the current Huaguo, the Ministry of Science and Technology has organized the research and development of lithography machines with 193nm process added to the five-year 863 plan.

That is, it is a generation behind the state-of-the-art 150nm process.

Huaguo did not put all the treasures on the Xinxin lithography machine, even though Zhou Xin showed strong goodwill.

Experts also have projects to do, and not all experts can be poached by the new chip lithography machine.

It's just that Huaguo's official 193nm lithography machine is still in the plan, and the prototype production will not be completed until 2005, while the 220nm process lithography machine sample of the new core lithography machine has come out.

Mass production is scheduled to begin in the first half of next year.

While mass production, technology research and development catches up with advanced processes.

The Ministry of Science and Technology and Shenhai City are two lines, the Ministry of Science and Technology has its own considerations, and Shenhai City also has its own considerations.

SMIC landed in Shenhai, and Xinxin lithography machine produced the first prototype in Shenhai, with an advanced process of 150nm, and 220nm chips still have a broad market.

Not to mention that this is still a domestic lithography machine, not to mention that the technology is bought from abroad, the engineers are mainly neon engineers, the problem is that this is Huaguo Company, behind it is Huaguo boss, or produced in Huaguo.

Shenhai attaches great importance to the new core lithography machine, whether it is tax incentives or honors at the municipal level, it can almost be given.

"You prepare, go to Cambridge, I have already said hello to ARM, and Xinxin Semiconductor will sign an agreement with ARM for in-depth cooperation."

Zhou Xin became a major shareholder of ARM, accounting for nearly 50% of the news, Guan Jianying still saw it from the news.

He admired Zhou Xin for always underwriting these things, and the things that were worth showing off to others seemed to be not worth mentioning to him.

ARM does not have the status of future generations, but it is well-known in the field of handheld computers, which is different from the future to occupy more than 95% of the smartphone chip market, but this is also a well-known chip company.

And ARM is the only one in this form of business.

Zhou Xin said things more vaguely, and Guan Jianying has been thinking about what kind of in-depth cooperation it is.

(End of chapter)