Traveling through the sword to engage in military industry.

Ren Zhong is not very clear about what these professors are thinking now, otherwise it would be a pleasant two-way trip. However, for Ren Zhong, the most important thing is to solve the reproduction of this basic model and understand the principles and manufacturing processes of all lithography machine components and various deposition equipment.

The current model is much more ideal than setting up a separate chip foundry.

Now we only need to purchase equipment to have access to a large number of high-end talents for free, and the funding for their research is much cheaper than maintaining a chip foundry.

After all, low-end chip foundry is not a good business. If a rookie like Ren Zhong who has no foundation in the chip industry breaks in, it would be easy for him to lose everything.

Although 8 million yuan has to be spent at once, the subsequent investment is very controllable.

At the end of the year, when it comes to funding Professor Chen's project, they can do so within their means, just like what Hu Rentao and his Materials Research Center did. Although the current investment is not small, an expense of around 100 million yuan is not a big problem for Ren Zhong.

After all, every year Ren Zhong brings back some hard goods from the world of Bright Sword to cash in.

Some of them are valuable things such as gold, jade, and diamonds that are easy to cash in the main world.

Besides, it's good to have money. Ren Zhong spent a lot of money, and the construction of the application projects of the School of Electronics went very smoothly. Even though the School of Electronics applied for nearly 2 million yuan for laboratory infrastructure, it was just a small amount compared to Ren Zhong's 8 million yuan donated equipment.

Therefore, no one in charge at the school is stupid enough to refuse such a deal.

You should know that Ren Zhong now says he wants to donate, but this batch of equipment is only a prepayment, and the balance still needs to be paid by Ren Zhong, but correspondingly, the ownership of the products now also belongs to Ren Zhong.

These scientific research equipment can be donated to the School of Electronics, and they can also be donated to other universities. With such huge amounts of equipment, I believe no university engaged in semiconductors and chips can resist the temptation.

There is even an Information Engineering College locally that has semiconductor and chip design majors, but their technology is a dozen blocks behind that of the Electronics College of Jincheng University of Science and Technology.

If Ren Zhong is not stuck on geographical restrictions, there is an electronic technology school in Changan that would be happy to accept this batch of equipment to build its own chip foundry laboratory.

On this point, the school management is fully aware that a complete chip foundry production line equipment will also have a great added value to the university's microelectronics and integrated circuit-related disciplines. With such a convenient foundry laboratory, the school's chip design level can be accelerated to speed up iterations and reduce a lot of costs.

If we take into account the full utilization of the production capacity of this production line and undertake some wafer fabrication and mass production business locally, we can even achieve self-sufficiency in the wages of laboratory technical support personnel.

By re-examining this matter, Ren Zhong found that he had suddenly broken through his original misconceptions in thinking, and everything became clear.

For cutting-edge things, there is absolutely no need to build a complete set of things by himself, especially in the main world. He cannot bring equipment into the world of Bright Sword on a large scale. What he should do is to spend little money to achieve big things. He must be good at leveraging resources.

In fact, just like the material research model in the main world, he spends money to buy some equipment and fund the research and development of some projects, and relies on the technical strength of universities or research institutes to develop, which is actually a very good way.

He does not need to bear the human resource expenses of the entire laboratory, nor does he need to support a large group of technical personnel like in the world of Bright Sword. Instead, he chooses to share these talents with universities and research institutions, so that he does not need to bear much cost of maintaining staff.

After he proposed clear research projects, he only needed to provide the necessary research funds for these projects and then wait to receive their results. In addition to his projects, these people could also do other things, such as teaching and other affairs, which was equivalent to sharing intellectual resources. This saved a lot of money compared to recruiting people and forming a team for research. More importantly, he didn't have to bother to find these talents, saving a lot of time on management.

As long as his cooperative technical teams have strong professional ethics and both parties cooperate for a long time, this model is actually very positive.

Early technology is relatively mature in the main world, so Ren Zhong does not need to consider monetization in the main world. They are encouraged to adopt the "take-it-as-it-is" approach to quickly implement existing technologies in the main world. At this time, the so-called copyright protection is completely useless to him, because Ren Zhong did not consider applying it in the main world, but instead transferred these research results to the world of Bright Sword.

Of course, if there is no new technology that can be directly transformed through "borrowing", like the latest progress in materials, it can basically be original research. For the new results obtained in this way, Ren Zhong may have to consider the issue of monetization to solve the problem of obtaining funds from the main world and realize larger-scale research.

Just like the second generation of high-temperature metal crystallization, Ren Zhong had a bold idea!

However, he couldn't take care of this now and temporarily concentrated on chips. Through this opportunity to build a chip processing laboratory for the School of Electronics, Ren Zhong saw the opportunity for leapfrog development in the chip processing equipment and lithography machines of the Liangjian World.

没必要从2微米、1微米、0.8微米、0.5微米、0.35微米、0.18微米、0.13微米这样一步步演化，现在有机会跨越式从2微米直接跳到90nm！

As a result, Ren Zhong suddenly felt that the original technical route of moving forward step by step along the x86 route was not enough.

The current chip design in the world of Bright Sword is still developing X86 step by step according to the old ideas that Ren Zhong got from the main world. However, after entering 86, it is basically difficult to obtain the circuit design drawings of the X286 CPU, and the design evolution must rely on the team.

After laying the technical foundation for 8080 and 8086, it was not too difficult to evolve according to the process flow. However, as time went on, more transistors were implemented and more talent was needed in chip design.

According to the current integrated circuit talent training in the world of Liangjian, this is a bit unable to keep up with the needs of development.

There is certainly no big problem in developing a generation of CPU in one and a half years, but the problem is that now that Ren Zhong has made a leap forward in the development of lithography machines, there is no need to repeat the low-level steps in chip design, but instead we need to find ways to achieve a leap!

As for X86, the channels through which Ren Zhong can purchase direct circuit designs are quite narrow and the possibility is extremely low.

But through another channel, ARM, Ren Zhong can obtain quite a wealth of information at a relatively low cost, and can even get most of ARM's designs for free!

Through communication with Sun Shanhe and others, Ren Zhong roughly understood ARM's licensing system, among which the most convenient for him was processor licensing: in this model, it is equivalent to ARM designing a CPU or GPU, and then selling the full set of design licenses to partners. After buying them, you only need to produce them according to the drawings to produce a very stable and reliable CPU. Of course, in this model, there is not much room for the buyer to re-customize the kernel modification and optimization, but there are still many options for you to play, such as which modules to configure, how many cores, how much cache, how high the frequency, what process, who will do the foundry, etc. ARM will also provide you with guidance and assistance, but how to turn the solution into a chip and set it to what specifications depends on your own ideas and uses. In order to promote their technology, ARM provides two super low-cost licensing methods for promotion. One is academic licensing, which is actually free, of course, only for universities and research institutions. The other is the DesignStart authorization: this is designed for learning and promotion, mainly to facilitate semiconductor companies to quickly understand ARM IP with low cost and low risk. The price is as low as tens of thousands of US dollars, which is naturally very cheap for a CPU design. However, chips designed based on the above two authorizations cannot be sold and can only be used for internal research.

For commercial purposes, this authorization is certainly not enough, but for Ren Zhong it is perfect and not enough, because his sales are not in the main world!

So after understanding this rule, Ren Zhong directly bought all the available versions of DesignStart in the ARM series, and got the basic version of the CPU design data package of each generation. In addition, he also purchased several complete development and design software packages to ensure that the main design can be done in one place where after-sales consultation is available. And a large number of software packages are cracked versions, the main point is to save as much as possible and live frugally!

Although CPU versions after ARM11 cannot be produced in the world of Bright Sword.

But as a reserve, Ren Zhong doesn't need more than one million US dollars.

Once the lithography system of the School of Electronics can be completely replicated in the Bright Sword World, the Bright Sword World will suddenly jump to the ARM11 era. Compared with the latest 286 in the Bright Sword World, this is a completely earth-shaking leap.

If adapted to the Hongmeng system, future desktop computers, mobile computers and even servers can be completely replaced by the ARM series.

Realize the development of ARM's single technology route.

At this moment, on the other side of the ocean, in the top semiconductor research centers such as MBI and Bell, they are still frantically researching and evolving to obtain the 8080 chip design and manufacturing technology. The copycat work has been fully launched, and the military CPU has achieved complete autonomy. However, considering the impact of commercial patent licensing, the two companies are not ashamed to directly copy and push it to the market. Instead, they have made micro-innovations on this basis and are preparing to launch new CPUs that they "designed" themselves.

At the same time, MBI was inspired by this and started researching RISC chips earlier than the main world. Their first-generation 801 chip concentrated more than 8 transistors and achieved stronger performance than the 8080.

According to their plan, they will develop two series of products, a new generation of personal PCs and host servers, based on the 801 chip in the future, so as to achieve direct competition with Tokyo University in the computer age.

While the computer industry of Dongda University was making progress, these two companies and research institutes, which gathered the top semiconductor and computer talents of Rogue Eagle, did achieve a leap from transistor computers to integrated circuit computers in terms of research and development. If it were not for Ren Zhong's intervention in the world of Bright Sword, it would be hard to say who would win between the computer industry of Dongda University and Rogue Eagle, which had started first.

There may be some unpredictable factors in the middle that affect the development of the entire process.

Although Tokyo University has completed the layout of many basic computer patents in the field of personal computers, the X86 technology system is strictly blocked by patents. All core patents are in the hands of Tokyo University. There is no possibility of surpassing X86 in the next evolution.

But MBI is taking another technical route of reduced instruction set technology, so it depends on who runs faster.

Judging from the history of the main world, X86 and RISC have their own advantages. X86 has the advantage in PC, but after entering the mobile Internet era, facing mobile terminals, it is the world of reduced instruction sets.

Both sides had their wins and losses at different times, but in the end, there was a trend of the two merging into one. Desktop PCs wanted to develop in the direction of mobility, while mobile devices wanted to eat up the market share of desktop and server devices. They were once entangled with each other.

However, in the history that Ren Zhong knows, the two still have their own development.

Make sure that each has its own living space. After all, both technologies have their own advantages and disadvantages.

In terms of performance, the high performance of X86 is difficult for ARM to catch up with. Therefore, in the desktop and server industries, the X86 technology system has the upper hand. However, as ARM continues to catch up with X86 in performance, in the current era of heavy tasks, many ARM products have been replaced on the desktop.

Even servers are designed with ARM chips.

As chip design becomes more complex and performance becomes stronger, ARM's performance has exceeded the requirements for ordinary home users.

It’s just that human beings’ pursuit of performance is endless, which has led to the continuous evolution of the CPU. People’s demand for entertainment and high-performance computing means that the CPU’s performance will never be sufficient.

Faster and faster!

Such application drives can never be met, at least in the silicon-based era.

In Ren Zhong's main world and time, no one thinks that their computer or mobile phone is already powerful enough and does not need to be improved.

However, in the current world of Bright Sword, MBI and Bell do not know what kind of evil team they are facing.

One by one, they are still following the information announced by Dongda that 286 is about to be released and a new "powerful" personal computer will be on the market.

After completing the design of 286, the research team of the University of Tokyo began the design process of the 286 computer, which is twice as powerful as the 2. In terms of the milestone planning of the technical route, the 386 computer will be a full 386-bit computer, and its performance will be a complete leap forward compared to the 32.

After independently designing two generations of CPUs, the Dongda chip design team in Liangjian World has made a lot of progress. Most of the backbone members have been trained in terms of capabilities. In addition, the information provided by Ren Zhong for 386 is already quite detailed, and many key principles such as logical module distribution design, bus design, input and output interface design, etc. are all very clear to them.

There is actually no big problem if we continue to follow the original technical route. The speed will just be more normal, and it will not make the competitors feel suppressed and desperate!

After reorganizing the chip layout during this period, Ren Zhong was very satisfied with the progress. Now he is just waiting for the equipment to arrive, and the team will start following up on the operation of the production line and carry out subsequent work.

In this way, Ren Zhong felt that he could relax and do something else. (End of this chapter)