The Millennium Semiconductor Survival Guide.

Chapter 55 People at the ISSCC Conference in San Francisco
"I have carefully studied the UWB chip you designed, and it has a certain value, which is enough to support a small and medium-sized semiconductor company.

If you do it yourself from design to manufacturing, then semiconductor companies with hundreds of millions of revenue will be fine.

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

On the eve of the ISSCC conference, Zhou Xin finally started to go to the laboratory frequently.

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

Everyone still wants to be familiar with a big guy like this.

But when Zhou Xin came to the laboratory, most of the time he just greeted them briefly, and then went to Hu Zhengming's office to discuss some key issues with him alone.

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

And provide 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 using UWB chip for home video IP network will be much higher than that of traditional cable mode. "

Even in the presence of high interference signals, information is transmitted error-free.

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

The 802.11 wireless standard was released in 1997, but slow speed and expensive hardware have been the biggest obstacles to its popularization.

The 802.11b standard that was popularized later has not yet been developed.

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

Waiting for the subsequent 5GHz frequency band, the transmission rate will be further increased significantly, that is, 54Mbit/s.

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

"There is another key issue, that is, UWB chips are military chips, and without FCC approval, they cannot be used in the civilian field."

FCC: Federal Communications Commission.

Compared with the traditional UWB technology, Zhou's newly designed UWB dual chipset technology increases the transmission distance, transmission rate and radio frequency penetration.

That is to say, the home WIFI system based on the UWB dual chipset can realize data stream transmission above 100Mbps.

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

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

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

However, the price/performance ratio of this thing is limited, and current applications do not need such high-speed traffic.

There is no application scenario in American, and there is even no application scenario in Huaguo. "

Huaguo’s backbone broadband expansion project only started in July 1998. After the start, it was expanded to 7M. Even if you use UWB technology to build a 155Mbps home network, China Telecom cannot support your high broadband demand.

Simply put, this technology is too advanced to be applicable now.

This is the generation gap and unsolvable problem brought about by the times.

Hu Zhengming continued: "I said before that there is a revenue scale of hundreds of millions of dollars, so you have to apply this technology to military radar.

But your identity as a Huaguo is doomed that your products cannot gain the trust of American.

But purely from the technical level, this is definitely a good enough technology.

It's just that his application scenario has not been discovered so far. "Hu Zhengming finally made a conclusion.

Zhou Xin's first patent surprised Hu Zhengming enough from a technical perspective.

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

Zhou Xin was a little frustrated. No wonder Samsung would transfer this technology out. It turned out that it could not find a large-scale application scenario.

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

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

After the funds are abundant, Zhou Xin intends to establish a specialized integrated circuit research institute in Silicon Valley.

"Well, it's a shame about the technology."

"Naturally, this is a dilemma that researchers often encounter.

In many cases, your invention has no immediate effect, and it may not be discovered its real use until several years, ten years or even decades later.

For example, Gao Kun verified the feasibility of optical fiber communication through experiments in 1966, and the first optical fiber communication system was not born until ten years later.

This is the norm. " Hu Zhengming comforted.

"In addition, you will need to make a report at the ISSCC, are you ready?"

"It's been prepared a long time ago, this kind of small reporting case."

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

Don't embarrass me. "

Hu Zhengming was completely joking. With Zhou Xin's achievements, even if he ran naked at the ISSCC site, he would be considered genuine by everyone.

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

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

San Francisco is the permanent venue for the ISSCC conference. Hu Zhengming has been here many times, and he is as familiar with the venue as he is at home.

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

Klaassen 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, nice to meet you, Chenming and I often chat about you in emails.

He often brags to me that he has a good student. "

Klassen is a bigwig in the industry. At this time, he is already the chief technical expert of Philips Semiconductors. He was previously the vice chairman of Philips R&D Center.

He not only has extremely high attainments in the field of integrated circuits, but also has deep attainments in the field of automation. One year later, he gave the opening speech at the Design Automation Conference held by IEEE.

ISSCC will be attended by a large number of researchers from academia and industry, and generally there will be some other agendas and presentations before 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'm just a student in the field of integrated circuits, and I have a lot to learn from senior practitioners."

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

Even in order to mislead competitors, say some specious things.

On the contrary, the academic world should be more frank, and there will be a lot of dry goods every year.

(End of this chapter)