The Millennium Semiconductor Survival Guide.

Chapter 222 iPod Zero
"2002 can be said to be a bumper year for Huaguo's chip industry, and many new production lines have been built. These lines have gradually caught up with the world's advanced level in terms of technology level and manufacturing process.

In addition, new production lines are no longer limited to areas with developed chip industries, and areas with underdeveloped chip industries such as the Northwest and Northeast have also begun to launch production lines.The improvement of the level of manufacturing technology has changed from the introduction of the first and second generations to a dynamic and independent behavior of enterprises.my country's chip industry is entering the "acceleration" stage."

In the first quarter, Xinxin Technology negotiated with financial institutions. Xinxing Investment invested 20.00% of the funds, and other financial institutions jointly paid for the remaining 80.00% to build a new chip production line in China.

Because Zhou Xin is willing to write the investment rate of return into the contract, which can guarantee the annual return of 7% of their funds, which will be guaranteed by Zhou Xin himself. Although the total investment will be 100 billion US dollars, the money will be invested in batches, and there is no need for a one-time investment. in place.

With Zhou Xin himself using the shares of Riot Games as a guarantee, the risk has been reduced to a very low level.

Under such a premise, not only American's financial institutions stepped in, but Temasek Sovereign Fund and Neon's venture capital institutions also joined in.

A total of 14 financial institutions participated in the fundraising of Xinxin Technology.The original $50 billion investment was doubled.

It is also easier to negotiate the price of 100 billion U.S. dollars back home.

In China, the news that Xinxin Technology invested 100 billion US dollars to build a production line caused an uproar in an instant.

Not to mention that it is only 2002, even in 2022, 100 billion US dollars is not a small number.Even if it is invested in batches, the first batch will be 20 billion US dollars, not to mention that this is a technology-based enterprise.

Huaguo also understands what kind of companies are good companies to bring in, such as chip manufacturing, which can drive the development of the entire industry, are first-class good companies.

In addition, Xinxin Technology stands behind Xinxin Technology. If others say 100 billion US dollars, they may still doubt it. Zhou Xin said that the probability is more than 100 billion US dollars, but the current plan is 100 billion US dollars. A steady stream.

After the announcement of the $100 billion plan, as Zhou Xin's domestic representative, Zhou Xin's former doctoral supervisor, and the CEO of Xinxin Technology, Hu Zhengming was approached by various people, which was even more exaggerated than Director Feng's big names.

Shenhai City knows that Xinxin Technology's investment is likely to be placed in Shenhai, at least most of it will be landed in Shenhai, but it is also a question of which area to put it in. It can't all be put in Zhangjiang, right?
有一组数据可以佐证100亿美元的外资在2002年是多么夸张的数据，MH区2001年全年共计吸收10.15亿美元，这还是增长了2.9倍，这10.15亿美元里，在2001年实际到账只有3.5亿美元。

This is a district of Shenhai, not a district of second- and third-tier cities.

This is the case in Minhang, not to mention the rest of the country.

Everyone knows that the headquarters of Xinxin Technology Huaguo is located in Shenhai, but the chip manufacturing is different, there can be many factories distributed all over the country.

At this time, it's everyone's turn to show their talents.

In the end, Hu Zhengming could only ask Shenhai City to help block these people.

"Welcome everyone. This is the first product launch conference held by Xinxin Technology in Silicon Valley. I hope it can impress everyone."

In the middle of 2002, on the eve of the developer conference held in Silicon Valley, Matrix hosted the first new core technology conference in Silicon Valley, hosted by Hu Zhengming.

The reputation of Hu Zhengming himself and Zhou Xin is enough to make this press conference a big one. This is a conference aimed at the chip industry, so no consumers are present, and most of the people who come are practitioners in the industry.

There were reporters from Silicon Valley technology media, executives from other chip companies, executives from Internet companies, and of course executives from consumer electronics companies, as well as a few consumer representatives.

Hu Zhengming was a little apprehensive. He had been a professor and started a company before, but this was his first development conference, because the Silue Semiconductor he started before was mainly aimed at chip design software for enterprises. Opportunities for development conferences.

"New Generation Bluetooth Technology"

A few large characters lit up behind Hu Zhengming, ".Xinxin Technology is independently developed on the basis of Bluetooth 1.0."

Yes, in China it relies on mobile phone integrated chips, and in foreign countries it uses Bluetooth chips.

Bluetooth technology developed slowly after it was proposed by Ericsson in 1994, but it has a broad market.

By 2006, the global Bluetooth chip shipments reached 6.9 million pieces.Such a large volume of shipments led to the reduction of the price of a single chip to less than 2 dollars at that time.

In the timeline changed by Zhou Xin, the era of smartphones has arrived earlier, and the global demand for Bluetooth chips will only become stronger.

With the help of technology leadership and technical advantages, firstly, it can control the standards of the Bluetooth Alliance, first-class enterprises set standards, and the Bluetooth chip developed by Xinxin Technology is at least seven years ahead of the current Bluetooth standard purely in terms of technical standards.

Firmly grasping the standard means enjoying the technological dividend in advance. Too many Bluetooth chips are shipped so that the price of a single chip is less than 2 dollars. Now that it is launched, the technology is monopolized by Xinxin Technology, and the price is at least 20 dollars.

Moreover, the chip technology needed for Bluetooth chips is not high-end, but it is not low-end either.

Last year, Ericsson launched the T39mc, the first mobile phone with built-in Bluetooth function.However, there are many problems in the early Bluetooth technology that have not been resolved, such as incompatibility between products, weak anti-interference ability, limited transmission speed, long connection time and so on.

The biggest problem is the high power consumption. It was not until the Bluetooth 2010 standard launched in 4.0 that Bluetooth low power consumption was realized.

The new generation of Bluetooth technology to be launched by Xinxin Technology is specially created for smart phones, and its main focus is low power consumption.

Originally, the battery life is short. If the existing Bluetooth standard is followed, the battery life will only be shorter.

After Hu Zhengming introduced Bluetooth 4.0, the representatives of IBM in the audience looked at each other with a wry smile: "It seems that we are going to give up the Bluetooth field."

Why do they say that, because the earliest Bluetooth standard alliance was jointly founded by Sony Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Nokia and Toshiba.

"If you give up, just give up. Have we given up too few fields since the rise of personal computers? The Bluetooth market is not worth mentioning compared to personal computers."

When Hu Zhengming announced the parameters of the chip named TWT2002N, the colleagues present with Bluetooth business felt lucky.

Because this Bluetooth chip adopts a 0.18 micron process, the higher the process means the lower the power consumption, which means that the advantage of TWT in terms of power consumption will be more obvious.

The most intuitive increase in power consumption due to technological progress comes from the increase in dynamic power for charging and discharging capacitors.

But such a high manufacturing process determines that its price will not be cheap.

That means they still have room to survive.

In fact, Xinxin Technology can design chips with lower process, such as 130nm process.

But why the 180nm process is chosen is because the current chip manufacturing industry in Huaguo can only produce 180nm chips.

In the first half of the year, Xinxin Technology acquired a chip manufacturing plant of Motorola in Jinmen, China at the same time as it took over Huahong's 8-inch production line.

There are a total of three production lines, all of which can only achieve 180nm process at present.

Hu Zhengming continued: "In order to enable global consumers to enjoy the advantages brought by the advancement of Bluetooth technology as soon as possible, we have joined hands with Sony Ericsson and Apple to launch products equipped with TWT2002N.

Mr. Katsumi Ihara, President of Sony Ericsson, will introduce it to you first. "

The executives of the member companies of the Bluetooth Alliance in the audience thought to themselves, didn’t everyone agree to develop the Bluetooth Alliance together? Why did you, Sony Ericsson, become a traitor first, and you didn’t notify us yet.

Because companies such as the Bluetooth Alliance basically have consumer electronics businesses, Sony Ericsson can cooperate with Xinxin Technology, can't Toshiba and Nokia not?

And because of the Bluetooth technology launched by Xinxin Technology, it is clear at a glance that their alliance has only two options, either to bring Xinxin Technology in, and to give actual power to let Xinxin Technology license their technology to other companies, or Just watched Xinxin Technology start anew.

"Sony Ericsson and Xinxin Technology have joined forces to create an Internet mobile phone T610 that focuses on music."

Sony Ericsson is a joint venture established after Sony and Ericsson merged their mobile phone businesses. At the beginning of the merger, the sales volume was not satisfactory, even worse than the sales volume of Sony and Ericsson's phone business.

It is also based on this background that Sony Ericsson is willing to cooperate with Xinxin.

As for the complaints of other companies in the Bluetooth Alliance, Sony Ericsson will not care about it. If it were you, you would keep it secret.

Not to mention that Sony Ericsson still wants to turn over in one fell swoop with the help of this new Bluetooth technology.

"In addition to the above-mentioned applications, the T610 is also pre-loaded with playnow, which supports the use of playnow to directly download songs from Sony Music artists.

The Sony Bluetooth headset launched together with the T610 has a battery life of up to 6 hours and can enjoy lossless sound quality. "

Katsumi Ibara boasted again, how good the sound quality of their phone is, and it is currently the best phone with the best sound quality among Bluetooth-enabled phones.

Consumers don't have much perception, and people in the industry don't know. Now, apart from you, there are few mobile phones equipped with Bluetooth function.

Mobile phones supporting the Bluetooth function did not begin to explode on a large scale until the Bluetooth 2003 standard was released in 1.2.

Because the Bluetooth standard has stayed at version 1.0 before, the maximum transmission rate is only 700kb, generally 100kb per second.

This transmission rate is difficult to support real-time calls.

After Bluetooth 1.2, the maximum transmission rate reached 1mb per second.The Bluetooth chip launched by Xinxin Technology this time also supports the standard Bluetooth transmission of Xinxin Technology, with a rate of 24mb per second.

This is the transmission speed of the Bluetooth 3.0 standard, and it is no exaggeration to describe it as a cannon for a shotgun.

"Our list price is $599, and the price of the Sony Bluetooth headset is $199."

The mobile phone launched by Sony Ericsson this time is quite satisfactory, but fortunately, it looks good and has all the functions it should have.

From Zhou Xin's point of view, there will be a large number of female users who will be willing to pay for Sony Ericsson's design language.As for the price/performance ratio, it is really low.

The Bluetooth chip is sold to Sony, and the Sony headset and Sony mobile phone add up, and the price of this set of chips exceeds $30.

Compared with the cost, it is simply a huge profit. If you don’t count equipment depreciation, patent authorization, equipment external service fees, etc., and only count labor costs and resource costs, the manufacturing cost of a single chip is less than 2 US dollars.

Even counting everything, the cost will not exceed $10.

Fortunately, the patent is in the hands of Xinxin Semiconductor. Xinxin Manufacturing, a subsidiary of Xinxin Technology that focuses on chip manufacturing, has a much more complicated shareholding.

Under Xinxin Manufacturing, there are many subsidiaries. As a third-level subsidiary of Xinxin Technology, it is called Xinxin (Hua Hong) Manufacturing, which is a joint venture with Huahong, and Xinxin (Jinmen) Manufacturing, which acquired Motorola.

Xinxin (Jinmen)’s main source of funding is American’s financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase.

These companies are only responsible for the production of Bluetooth chips. They sell the chips to Xinxin Technology, and then Xinxin Technology sells them to Apple and Sony Ericsson.

However, the rate of return promised by overseas investment institutions is only 7%. According to the profit of Bluetooth chips, it only needs to leak a little profit for Xinxin manufacturing.

Therefore, Zhou Xin has never worried that the task cannot be completed. He even thinks that domestic investment institutions should also come to invest.

It's a pity that Huaguo's financial institutions are slow to move in this regard.

If Sony Ericsson's products are aimed at female users, they are exquisite, small and cute, and with the bluetooth earphones in pink color, the main focus is on the subdivision of female users, which is not bad for money.

Then the products launched by Apple focus on a sense of technology and future.

It still continues the design language of Apple's iPod, but compared with the previous generation of iPod, this generation of iPod is a little longer.

After the new-generation iPod was rotated and shown on the screen behind Jobs, Jobs said: "Yes, as you can see, the entire iPod Zero has no interface, only buttons."

The consumer representatives in the audience were all exclaiming, Sony Ericsson's mobile phone just made them feel pretty good, so Apple's ipod zero can be said to make them feel amazing.

Not only are they amazed, but other well-informed executives in the electronics industry have a feeling of amazement.

Jobs said: "ipod zero supports Xinxin Technology's Bluetooth standard, supports Bluetooth transmission, and supports the latest wireless charging technology.

Without an interface, how do we download songs?Still use Bluetooth connection to download, after you buy ipod zero, we will give you a Bluetooth headset and external accessories.

After you plug the external accessories into the USB port of your computer, you can use the computer to pair with the ipod zero, and the average transmission speed of 10mb is actually not much worse than USB2.0.

Much faster than USB1.0 and USB1.1. "

早期USB1.0传输速度只有0.18mb/s，1.0也才1.5mb/s，到了2000年发布的USB2.0传输速度才提高到了60mb/s。

The idea of ​​ipod zero was jointly conceived by Zhou Xin and Jobs. At first, after Jobs learned about the Bluetooth technology proposed by Xinxin Technology, he said that the new generation of iPods should remove the headphone jack, so that users can only connect to Bluetooth, isn’t it okay? ?
Then Zhou Xin said: "Then it's better to simply remove all the ports, and use wireless charging and Bluetooth transmission to download files, wouldn't it be better?"

(End of this chapter)