In the future, more than a quarter of the revenue of the chip industry will come from mobile phones, which is why the success or failure of Mphone is related to the success of the entire strategy.

In its April 2021 report, "Strengthening the Global Semiconductor Supply Chain in an Age of Uncertainty," the Ameriken Semiconductor Industry Association wrote: In dollar terms, mobile phones account for 26% of semiconductor sales.

In the era of mobile Internet, mobile phones need so many chips that they need more than a dozen semiconductor chips to manage batteries, Bluetooth, wifi, cellular networks, audio, cameras, and so on.

Mphone has succeeded and occupied a large enough market share in the mobile phone field, and matrix can fully lead the redistribution of a part of the semiconductor industry chain.

The madness of the iPhone impressed Zhou Xin when he was studying in California, starting from the iPhone4, the release of each generation of the iPhone can become a carnival for young people, regardless of whether they are interested in technology and the Internet, they will pay attention to the release of the iPhone without exception.

The sales of the first-generation Mphone can satisfy Zhou Xin, after all, this is a castrated version of the smartphone. You must know that when the iPhone 6 was in place, the sales volume broke 10 million in the first week.

Therefore, Zhou Xin knew that he had personally opened the prelude to the mobile Internet, and the war was far from being a final conclusion. Even after the global mobile phone market slumped in later generations, the entire smartphone market competed for ten years.

In a field that has been competing for more than ten years, except for Apple's firm sitting, even Samsung does not dare to say that it will not be eliminated in the field of smartphones.

Therefore, Zhou Xin never thought that Mphone would win the game, and still maintained a high level of vigilance.

After listening to Zhou Xin's words, Cao Yongluo said: "It's worthy of you, or you have the level, it may be that I have been on the front line, so I feel that there is no hope." The Ministry of Information Industry has decided to introduce policies to encourage chip design enterprises and chip manufacturing enterprises.

In the past, the policy of chips has been mixed with the software industry, accounting for only a small part of the space, and now it is planned to list the chips separately and introduce incentive policies.

I also plan to start from a small field, and I set up a chip design company called Yongluo Technology in the first half of the year.

I want to start with battery management chips, which are relatively small in this field, but there is a broad market. You can recruit a group of people first and start with this field. Moreover, Texas Instruments' technology on battery management chips is almost completely public.

From design guidelines to schematics to assembly drawings, and even PCB layouts, all we need to do is make some changes on their basis, reduce costs, make the cost of this set of solutions, and then sell them to other mobile phone manufacturers. ”

Battery management systems have been around for a long time, and they were available on mobile phones in the early days. In the earliest days, Motorola used disposable circuits to protect mobile phone batteries.

These disposable circuits protect the battery from burnout by setting thresholds. This disposable circuit can be regarded as the earliest battery management system. After the nineties, the battery management system consisted of a single chip with an integrated protector and measuring device.

It is integrated into the PCB assembly to protect the battery and is responsible for the conversion, distribution, detection and other power management of electrical energy. In other words, monitoring the battery level and charging are only the most basic functions of the power management chip.

In day-to-day use, the power management chip is responsible for allocating power to different parts of the phone. Once the battery level is detected to be too low, the user will be reminded to charge it through the system. Prompting the user to charge is the result of an early warning from the power management chip.

At the same time, during the charging process, if the battery is detected to be fully charged, the power management chip will cut off the power supply. Even if the phone charger is connected to the phone, it will no longer charge the battery, but will power the phone. Therefore, charging the phone overnight will not damage the phone and the battery life will not be shortened.

Zhou Xin said after listening: "It seems that you and Lao Guan want to go together, and Xinxin Semiconductor is also thinking of starting with battery management chips, Bluetooth chips, and multimedia chips, and practicing for engineers through these."

Haha, everyone is eyeing the battery management chip. However, it is difficult for battery management chips to compete with Texas Instruments or Infineon, Xinxin Semiconductor can rely on Mphone, and Yongluo Technology's power management chips have to find the market by themselves. ”

Texas Instruments is a well-deserved giant in the field of chips, as long as it is related to chips, you can always find that Texas Instruments occupies the C position to attract the attention of companies entering this field.

Zhou Xin knows that power management chips are extremely promising, and smart battery management chips alone are already a huge enough market, and electric vehicles are no less than smartphones.

If power management is the icing on the cake for smartphones, it's the difference between life and death for electric vehicles. Tesla's battery management system is built by itself, but their battery management chip is the battery management chip of the Texas Instruments BQ series purchased.

Tesla relies on just one Texas Instruments battery monitoring and protection chip to manage all 18650 batteries. Why did Tesla choose Texas Instruments? Because Texas Instruments has made its battery management chip design documents public.

Tesla can design its own battery management system based on these documents.

By 2021, the global market share of battery management systems will reach $7.8 billion, and will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 19.5%, while the market share of battery management chips will be $4.3 billion.

Early battery management chips were not taken seriously because the effects they achieved were simple, but battery protection and fuel gauging were far less important than in the future. The main players are Texas Instruments and Infineon, and Texas Instruments will have the technology in an almost fully public form.

After this market is large enough, many new players have appeared in battery management chips, such as STMicroelectronics, Analog Devices Semiconductor, Microchip Technology, etc., all of which are late entrants.

Battery management chips also have an additional mission, combining measurement performance with application robustness to monitor and balance each battery cell, extend battery life, and track the charging process.

Cao Yongluo said: "I also wanted to try it, I didn't think that I would definitely be able to enter the supply chain of Mphone, and in the end, it depends on the quality of the product."

The main thing is that there is too much shortage of people, and there is too little talent in chip design in China, so almost all of the people I found have to start over.

Compared with me, the general coordinator, not to mention that you recently poached Professor Hu back, is much better than me in terms of talents. What did Berkeley's side think? You came to school, and you poached the professor. ”

Zhou Xin said: "So now the head of the department of electrical engineering took me personally, and I met the principal when I was eating in the cafeteria at Berkeley, and he told me that he didn't believe that I could poach Oldham."

In the past three years at Berkeley, I have recruited many professors from Berkeley to my company, so the president does not dare to let Chinese professors come to my company. ”

Zhou Xin thought to himself, I really can't poach William Oldham, but I can poach Jin Zhijie.

(Jijie Kim, a Chinese-American woman, has served as chair of Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering since 2012 and as Berkeley's vice president since 2016.) ）

Zhou Xin wanted to poach Jin Zhijie to Xinxin Semiconductor, and when the principal was talking to him, Zhou Xin was thinking: Look at me poaching the future head of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Berkeley in advance.

Cao Yongluo laughed after hearing this: "Silicon Valley does have a lot more talents. ”

When Zhou Xin was chatting with Cao Yongluo in San Francisco, it was 11 o'clock in the morning in Huaguo, thousands of miles away.

China ushered in the first working day of the new week, and everyone knew that China's accession to the WTO was very important to them, but they could not say what kind of important law it was.

At this time, Hu Zhengming has been working in Xinxin Technology for almost two months, and he has also clarified the future strategic direction after frequent communication with Zhou Xin.

At this time, he is making every effort to promote the cooperation between Xinxin Technology and Hua Hong Semiconductor. Hu Zhengming believes that after all, he still has to master a chip manufacturing company.

"Mr. Jiang, what do you think of the cooperation plan we mentioned earlier?" Hu Zhengming asked.

Mr. Jiang here refers to Jiang Shoulei, vice chairman of Huahong Group, and vice chairman of Huaguo Semiconductor Industry Association, which can almost be said to be a full participant in Huaguo's chip industry, as early as 1968, he began to work in the state-owned 742 factory in Wuxi.

Jiang Shoulei said: "Professor Hu, we have also dealt with each other for many years, in 1995, when I was still the vice president of Huayue Electronics, when you came to Yan University to give a lecture, I went to listen to it, and then asked you some questions privately.

We should be old friends, and I am very happy to see a top talent like Professor Hu devoting himself to Huaguo's chip business.

At the same time, we have no doubts about the financial strength of Xinxin Technology, and we also have no doubts about the technical strength. With the financial strength of Synchip, engineers can be recruited from Silicon Valley, Hsinchu, Tokyo, and Seoul.

Therefore, in both public and private, I agree to the cooperation between Huahong Group and Xinxin Technology.

I only have one question, that is, Xinxin Technology relies on technology and capital to become a shareholder, and you do not occupy a controlling stake, but you need to adopt the method of different rights of the same shares, and you need to have control of the newly established joint venture.

It's hard to agree on this when we make decisions internally. Taking the joint venture between Neon's NEC and Hua Hong NEC, Hua Hong NEC as an example, NEC's conditions are very average now, but they are very good when DRAM prices are high.

They are willing to contract all the sales of chips produced by Huahong NEC, and we just need to do a good job in chip manufacturing.

Even so, we did not hand over control of Huahong NEC to NEC. ”

Hu Zhengming interrupted: "Mr. Jiang, we can be more straightforward, I visited Huahong NEC, and I also talked to Keiichi Shimakura.

In Huahong NEC, almost all the middle-level NEC parachuted from Tokyo, although the chairman was appointed by Huahong, but to put it bluntly, it only played a role of stamping and signing.

Keiichi Shimakura is the actual manager of Hua Hong NEC, including the future business direction of Hua Hong NEC: strengthening cooperation with Chinese LSI design companies, producing LSI for the Chinese market, users are not limited to China's semiconductor foundry business, accepting NEC's production commissions, etc.

Hua Hong didn't actually interfere with these.

The purpose to be achieved by Xinxin Technology is similar to that of NEC, and compared with NEC, Xinxin Technology has more strong strength both in terms of capital and market. ”

The main thing is that Hu Zhengming is impatient, to put it bluntly, the conditions offered by Xinxin Technology are very superior, Huahong lost 700 million yuan in the first eight months of this year, and they only earned more than 1 billion yuan a year during the subversive period, and the depreciation of 800 million yuan was removed, and the profit was 350 million yuan.

The condition given by Xinxin Technology is to invest 200 million US dollars in shares, Huahong injects new companies with its own 8-inch production line as assets, and Xinxin Technology is willing to commit to the annual sales revenue of chip foundry enterprises after the joint venture of more than 2 billion yuan.

Jiang Shoulei shook his head: "No, no, Professor Hu, you misunderstood what I meant, I know that the conditions for Xinxin are very superior."

I would like to say that the control of Hua Hong NEC is in the hands of the Neon people, because we have asked for them, but even so, the control of Hua Hong NEC is not written into any contract.

We have maintained a tacit understanding with NEC, and we can maintain this tacit understanding with Xinxin Technology.

The newly established Huahong-Xinxin, Xinxin manages this enterprise and manages chip production, and we can't write it into the contract. ”

An 8-inch production line costs between $700 million and $800 million, and the entire Huahong currently has only one 8-inch production line.

Chip manufacturing is so expensive, even Zhou Xin can't afford such a huge asset investment.

Therefore, he discussed with Hu Zhengming whether he could adopt a new way to cooperate with state-owned enterprises.

There are many places in China that want to engage in semiconductors and want to replicate the success of Silicon Valley. Yanjing plans to invest $30 billion in the northern microelectronics industry base, with Shougang as the main contractor, Shougang invested $1.35 billion at the beginning of this year to build an 8-inch chip factory, including two 8-inch, or 0.25-micron production lines.

Of course, Shougang later shelved the plan, and then invested the money in the real estate sector, which became Shougang's main business.

Not only later, but now Huahong's huge losses in the first 8 months still scared other places that want to engage in semiconductors.

Localities across the country that want to engage in semiconductors want to wait and see.

But it does not prevent Hu Zhengming from taking it out as a bargaining chip for negotiation: "Mr. Jiang, there is not only Huahong with an 8-inch production line, but also other companies, such as Shougang's 8-inch production line is also about to be launched, and we are not the only Huahong who can cooperate."

Including Shenhai and private enterprises such as SMIC.

We chose Hua Hong because we had a good foundation for cooperation before, and Hua Hong has sufficient experience in the field of chip manufacturing.

However, it does not mean that Huahong is the only object.

I know your concerns, and Xinxin Technology also has its own insistence. ”

(End of chapter)