Technology invades the modern world

Chapter 117 The Brilliance of Chinese Scientists (Seeking Monthly Tickets!)

Because this is tantamount to telling her that the computer she and her colleagues were building was meaningless.

However, everyone quickly realized that something was wrong.

Because this thing is simply not something that China can manufacture at present.

They are all top experts in China's semiconductor and computer industries; China could not possibly build this thing without their help.

As for imports from the Soviet Union or other countries, that's also unlikely.

Because of Lin Ran last year, China is now able to contact academic journals from the outside world, and is even more open than before.

In the past few years, China relied entirely on Soviet and Russian journals. It was as if the Soviet Union had digested Western academic journals and then shared them with China.

The most classic example of this should be Lysenko.

Because of Lysenko's existence, Soviet academic journals at the time would not publish Mendelian genetics and modern biological research, and papers opposing Lysenko were almost impossible to publish.

Journals like the Soviet Botanical Journal and Progress in Agricultural Science published almost exclusively articles supporting Lysenko's theory in the late 40s and early 50s.

Isaac Agapov attempted to publish an article refuting Lysenko in the Journal of Genetics, but it was rejected by the editorial board.

This also affected China. It wasn't until 60 years later that Chinese journals such as the Acta Genetica Sinica (founded in 1978, but its predecessor research had been revived in the 60s) began to publish papers based on gene theory.

In the past two years, although Russia has stopped providing academic journals, people have been able to access top-tier academic journals from Europe and America.

Although it may take four or five months, or even half a year, to get your hands on it after the publication date.

However, they did not deviate from the findings of leading international research.

It's hard to imagine any computer having such power.

It is even only the size of a card.

Dean Qian sighed: "If it weren't for this, we wouldn't have made you leave Yanjing on New Year's Day and travel thousands of miles to the southwestern border."

I was just as shocked as you were when I saw it, maybe even more shocked than you were.

But that's the truth; it's right in front of me.

The world is materialistic. No matter how bizarre or beyond my comprehension it may be, it is real, and we must accept its existence.

Make use of it.

We will provide a user manual for it later, so you can test its performance and verify what I said.

Ladies and gentlemen, we don't have much time left.

I can't explain to you where this thing came from, but I can tell you that it's definitely not something we have alone; other countries have it too.

Whether it's its application or its replication, we need to quickly explore and understand it thoroughly.

Xia Peisu raised his hand: "Could I make a judgment about it first?"

She simply couldn't hold it in any longer.

Dean Qian nodded: "For now, you can only look, not touch."

I want to tell you all that it's more important than our lives.

Do you understand? "

Everyone felt a heavy sense of mission after hearing that other countries also had this thing.

It's unknown how much the country paid to acquire this little gadget called "Raspberry Pi".

But just imagining it makes me realize that a huge price must have been paid, and countless comrades who were secretly working must have been sacrificed.

To be honest, everyone's imagination is pretty vivid.

Dean Qian and others who were among the first to come into contact with Raspberry Pi imagined that America must have had Raspberry Pi, and maybe even the Soviet Union.

They felt an extreme sense of crisis.

Meanwhile, the Chinese scientists who were brought here were imagining how amazing this thing was, and how difficult it must have been for China to obtain it.

People have already thought of the countless patriots in modern Chinese history who sacrificed their lives to deliver a valuable message.

This computer, called the Raspberry Pi, was clearly far more valuable than any information they could imagine.

The corresponding cost was certainly beyond their comprehension.

After considering this, everyone's complaints about being forced to work here vanished almost instantly.

Xia Peisu stood very close and observed the entire process of the Raspberry Pi from powering on to running, and then to Dean Qian operating it with a teletypewriter.

She said, "Dean Qian, I guess this is a computer built on transistors, or a computer built on other components that I don't know about."

But at least it's not a vacuum tube.

Since I haven't handled it, I won't discuss its size and weight. Just considering its boot speed and heat generation, it's unlikely to be a vacuum tube.

On the one hand, the power supply equipment here shows that it uses a 12V lead-acid battery and a voltage regulator, and is powered by 5V DC.

Vacuum tubes require a high-voltage power supply of at least 100V. For example, the 107 tube, which I was involved in, requires a power consumption of several kilowatts.

In addition, the underlying operating logic of a vacuum tube is closely related to its temperature.

The physical basis of vacuum tubes comes from the Richardson-Duchmann equation, where the thermionic emission current density J is related to the temperature T by the equation: J = AT²e/kTJ. Its underlying operating logic relies on thermionic emission, where heating the cathode allows electrons to gain sufficient energy to escape from the surface.

In other words, the higher the temperature, the more electrons are emitted, and the greater the current. If the temperature is insufficient, the amount of emitted electrons decreases, and the vacuum tube cannot function properly.

Therefore, the vacuum tube needs to be preheated. From the start-up to waiting for the filament to heat the cathode to the working temperature, it takes at least a few seconds.

Therefore, its components should not be vacuum tubes.

After Xia Peisu finished speaking, Dean Qian sighed inwardly. Professionals are professionals. They can tell at a glance that this is not a vacuum tube. It would take gathering the most professional people in China to figure out how it works.

He sighed inwardly. If he had a choice, he really wouldn't want to bring everyone away from Yanjing and into this godforsaken place.

Among the semiconductor experts present, there are many who followed him back to China, such as Wu Xijiu.

Not only will he come here, but his wife and children will also come with him.

Dean Qian thought to himself that all he could do was try to get them better treatment.

Xia Peisu continued, "But that's not necessarily true."

It is a creation far beyond my imagination.

Vacuum tubes are not impossible. After all, vacuum tubes do not only work on thermionic emission, but also on field emission and photoemission.

The former refers to the phenomenon where electrons escape from the surface of a material through quantum tunneling under the influence of a strong electric field, without needing to heat the cathode to a high temperature. Its theoretical basis was proposed by Fowler Nordheim in the 20s, primarily relying on the tunneling behavior of electrons under high electric fields.

This has no temperature requirements, but our current understanding is that field emission requires ultra-high voltage, at least several thousand volts, or even tens of thousands of volts, to generate a strong electric field at the pointed cathode, causing electrons to tunnel through and emit.

This does not fit the situation.

Furthermore, the electron flow of field emission is difficult to control as precisely as the gate of a thermionic tube.

It doesn't seem quite like it.

Don't say that Chinese scientists didn't know about the field-induced launch at that time.

X-rays were developed based on the principle of field emission. Cold cathode X-ray tubes were already in practical use in medicine and industry in 1961. The Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences began researching X-ray tubes in 1958.

In fact, in the early years, China had been tracking and even catching up with many cutting-edge technology fields.

Xia Peisu continued, "Another type is photoelectric emission, which is the excitation of electrons on the surface of a material by photons, causing them to escape in violation of the work function."

This is based on Einstein's photoelectric effect theory, but it requires external light to illuminate the cathode. Therefore, it doesn't quite fit the bill.

However, the reason I say that the possibility of vacuum tubes cannot be ruled out is because they are too advanced, so advanced that they are beyond our current understanding. If it is a type of vacuum tube that we do not know about, and we waste time due to misjudgment, that would be terrible.

For us, time is life.

Wu Xijiu added: "From the current perspective, it is at least not any type of vacuum tube that we know of."

Another direction is the transistor, which, in terms of power consumption, is more like a transistor.

When I was studying at America University in 1955, I saw the TRADIC computer in an academic journal. It was similar to this computer: small in size, low in power consumption, low in operating voltage, and did not require preheating.

Of course, when I say small size, I mean compared to vacuum tube computers; they used to take up an entire warehouse, but now they've shrunk to just one room.

The internal circuit diagram of TRADIC is also very similar to this.

TRADIC, Transistorized Airborne Digital Computer, was the first all-transistor computer developed by Bell Labs for the American Air Force. Development began in 1951 and was completed in 1954.

To add a point, although this device was built for the Air Force, it was not kept secret. On March 14, 1955, Bell Labs officially announced TRADIC as the "first all-transistor computer" through a press release, accompanied by a photo, which is shown above.

The June 1955 issue of Popular Electronics also reported on TRADIC, calling it a "supercomputer".

Wu Xijiu, who was studying at MIT at the time, was unaware that TRADIC was abnormal.

"But it still doesn't make sense. Although transistors can be further miniaturized, it's still beyond my imagination to be this small."

The transistor was invented by Bell Labs in 1947 and entered the practical application stage in the 1950s.

The TRADIC computer used approximately 700 transistors.

In 1958, Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor invented the integrated circuit, which integrates multiple transistors onto a single chip.

Even Robert, the founder of Fairchild Semiconductor, thought that the future would be able to integrate a few thousand transistors at most.

I never imagined it could be integrated down to the nanoscale.

Not to mention that at that time, China's understanding of transistors was only at the unstable millimeter level.

"Ahem, excuse me, I have to say something." Xie Xide raised his hand and said, "I think we can't waste time and we need to be brave enough to make judgments, ahem."

Xie Xide was a PhD from MIT and the first female president of Fudan University. She was engaged in theoretical research on surface physics and semiconductor physics for many years. In 56, she was seconded to Yenching University to participate in the establishment of the semiconductor professional group. In 58, she returned to Shanghai University.

She arrived even earlier than the experts from Yanjing, and despite feeling unwell, she still chose to move her entire family to Panzhihua to work.

She said, "Theoretically, it should be a transistor."

Based on quantum mechanics, the band gap of silicon is 1.12 eV and the lattice constant is 0.543 nm, both of which have been precisely measured.

The core of a transistor is the PN junction, which controls the movement of electrons and holes through doping.

The mathematical model of a PN junction describes carrier diffusion and drift. However, solid-state physics research shows that the physical properties of materials can change as the size decreases.

Research on thin films and microparticles has extended to micrometer-scale effects. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and wave-particle duality demonstrate that electrons exhibit wave-like properties at the microscale, and specifically at the nanoscale, quantum tunneling occurs.

In other words, the lattice constant of silicon crystal is approximately 0.543 nanometers, and the interatomic spacing is between 0.2 and 0.3 nanometers. Theoretically, the smallest size of a transistor could be close to several lattice units, that is, at the nanometer scale.

A 10-nanometer structure can contain 18-20 silicon atoms.

The mean free path of charge carriers, electrons and holes, is approximately 10-100 nanometers in silicon.

If the transistor size is reduced to this range, the charge carriers can still effectively transmit signals, theoretically supporting nanoscale operation.

The width of the depletion region of a PN junction decreases with increasing doping concentration. Solid-state physics shows that, through heavy doping and a strong electric field, the depletion region can be shrunk to the nanometer scale while maintaining switching functionality.

The de Broglie wavelength of electrons is approximately 10 to 50 nanometers at room temperature. When device sizes approach this scale, quantum effects significantly influence electron behavior.

This suggests that transistors may operate at the nanometer scale, but they can also be susceptible to interference. The existence of the Raspberry Pi made me realize that transistors are indeed capable of operating at the nanometer scale.

In addition, solid-state physics studies have shown that as the size decreases, the proportion of surface atoms increases, which provides a theoretical basis for miniaturization.

In other words, if the manufacturing process breaks through the micrometer limit, the transistor size can approach the lattice scale.

Last year I read Feynman's book, "There Is Infinite Space at the Bottom," in which he proposed that the laws of physics allow for the manipulation of devices at the atomic scale.

It mentions the possibility of building circuits with atoms, which aligns with the concept of nanoscale transistors.

Do you understand? Although we don't know how it was made or how the manufacturing process was broken through, I believe it is a transistor.

This is what theoretical physics inspired me.

I believe America and the Soviet Union had this equipment, but we were probably the last to get it. If we want to catch up with them, whether it's replicating it or at least achieving micron-level transistors, we need to determine our direction as soon as possible.

Based on my professional judgment, it is a nanoscale transistor, and we must continue along the path of transistor integration and miniaturization.

We do not have the time to explore multiple technological routes, nor do we have the resources to pursue multiple technological routes simultaneously.

There seem to be many people here, but if we disperse, we'll just be wasting precious time.

I believe it is a transistor! And nanometer-scale transistors stacked on this tiny device in a way I can't even imagine.

If Lin Ran could hear the current speculations of Chinese scientists, he would surely laugh heartily with satisfaction.

　I'll still present three chapters of 10,000 words. I'd like to say a few words and apologize for any minor errors or omissions, as I'm not an expert on everything. Please forgive any inconsistencies.

　　Furthermore, I will definitely make this story original, interesting, and not intellectually simplistic. There were many outstanding scientists in China at that time, and I will base it on reality so that it doesn't become a mindless shock story. They will be just background figures, and their efforts will be an indispensable factor in the rise of China in this timeline.

　　Finally, I'm begging for monthly votes! Waaaaah~
　　
　
(End of this chapter)