Courtyard House: A Major Power's Heavy Industry, Hand-Crafted Nuclear Fusion

Base 001, Workshop 701, Central Control Room.

The clock struck four in the morning.

The air was thick with the aroma of coffee and a slightly agitated, static-filled atmosphere. The thirty-odd core technical staff, including gray-haired senior experts and young university students, were all staring like statues at the oscilloscope screen directly in front of them.

This was a life-or-death moment.

On that clean operating table with constant temperature and humidity, lay a black square, no bigger than a fingernail.

It has neat pins, and a line of gold code is laser-engraved on the black epoxy resin encapsulation:

HX-1001.

This is an abbreviation for "Huaxia-1001", which is also Huaxia's first truly general-purpose microprocessor manufactured using a 1-micron process.

"All voltage tests completed, normal."

"Clock signal input, normal."

"Reset signal, normal."

Ye Xinyi sat at the control panel, her voice still calm, but if you looked closely, you would notice that the tips of her fingers on the keyboard were a little white.

The design of this chip was created by her and her team over the past month, working day and night using hand-drawn blueprints and the simple EDA software developed by Su Zheng.

It integrates 29000 transistors. The position of each transistor and the direction of each connection embody countless hours of painstaking effort.

"Su Gong".

Ye Xinyi turned her head to look at Su Zheng standing behind her, "Can we power it on now?"

Su Zheng took a deep breath.

He was still wearing that iconic military overcoat, arms crossed, his gaze calm.

"Power it on."

He only said two words.

"Yes."

Ye Xinyi gently pressed the red power button.

Nourishes—

The faint sound of current flowing through the circuit board was exceptionally clear in the quiet workshop.

Everyone's heart was in their throat.

The green dot on the oscilloscope started to flicker.

Chaotic waveforms... fluctuations... more fluctuations...

suddenly!

The waveform instantly converged, transforming into a stable, powerful, and rhythmic square wave, much like the beating of a heart!

"Clock locked!"

The young technician in charge of monitoring jumped up, his voice cracking with excitement, "Frequency...frequency is stable at 10MHz! The waveform is perfect! No noise!"

"Don't rush, run the instruction set."

An elderly expert shakily pressed down on the young man's shoulder, but his hand trembled even more violently than the young man's. "A heartbeat alone is not enough; we need to see if it can 'think.'"

Ye Xinyi quickly entered a series of test commands.

This is the most basic arithmetic operation: 1+1=2.

Although it is simple, for a chip, this means that its arithmetic logic unit, registers, control unit, and bus interface are all connected, making it a complete living entity.

The cursor is blinking on the screen.

one second.

two seconds.

It felt like an eternity.

A line of green characters popped up on the screen:

RESULT: 00000010

STATUS: OK

Dead silence.

A deathly silence.

Immediately afterwards, a long-suppressed cheer erupted like a volcanic eruption, blowing off the roof of the entire workshop!

"It's done! It's done!"

"It's figured it out! It's figured it out!"

"It's alive! It's alive!"

Several elderly experts, all over sixty years old, hugged each other like children and wept bitterly.

They are the first generation of semiconductor engineers in this country. They experienced starting from scratch, the withdrawal of experts from Russia, and the blockade by the Western world.

They've heard far too many harsh words:

"Chinese people cannot manufacture chips."

"You are at least fifty years behind the world's advanced level."

"You're only good enough to make shirts and trade them for our planes and computers."

But today.

it's here.

Deep underground in the northwestern desert.

They used hand-rolling equipment, rudimentary materials, and meticulously drawn blueprints to create this "Chinese chip"!

Su Zheng's eyes also welled up as he looked at the weeping old people.

He walked to the control panel and picked up the still-heating chip.

It's very light.

It weighs only a few grams.

But he knew that this small stone was heavier than ten thousand tons of steel. Because it was the key to the Third Industrial Revolution, the ticket to the information age.

"Have the performance test results come out yet?" Su Zheng asked.

"They're out!"

Ye Xinyi handed him a freshly printed report, a rare smile of pride playing on her lips. "Su Zheng, take a look. This data... might scare a lot of people."

Su Zheng took the report and quickly scanned it.

Clock speed: 10MHz.

Number of transistors: 29000.

Instruction set: Fully compatible with x86 architecture.

Floating-point arithmetic capability: ...

"Let's compare them." Su Zheng looked to the side.

There was a parameter sheet for the 8086 processor that Intel had just released.

8086 clock speed: 5MHz.

Number of transistors: 29000.

Manufacturing process: 3 micrometers.

"Although our process is 0.9 micrometers 'hand-made', the leakage rate is controlled extremely well because of the high precision of the lens."

Ye Xinyi explained, "So with the same number of transistors, our power consumption is only two-thirds of theirs, while our clock speed is 1.5 times that of theirs! This is not just benchmarking, it's... crushing them."

"What a crushing defeat."

Su Zheng laughed loudly and slammed the report on the table. "Seal this report and classify it as top secret. Also, send a special telegram to the Central Committee with only four words:"

"The Great Wall is now illuminated."

……

After the cheers subsided, the harsh realities of life came to the fore.

In the conference room, Su Zheng pointed to a large area of ​​red dots on the wafer.

"Although we've got the chip working, the yield rate... is just too low."

Su Zheng smiled wryly, "Two hundred chips are cut from a single wafer, but only seven are usable. The yield rate is 3.5%."

"3.5%..."

Old Chen gasped in distress, "The cost of just one wafer is several thousand yuan. That means the cost of a single chip is several hundred yuan! How much would we have to sell them for to break even?"

"This result was achieved only because Grandpa Zhang and his team personally oversaw the lithography machine."

One technician added, "If ordinary workers were to operate it, the yield rate would probably be less than 1%."

"That's the difference between laboratory products and industrial products."

Su Zheng tapped the table. "We're making industrial products like we're making works of art. This kind of cost, apart from being used for missiles and satellites, is simply not suitable for civilian use. And if it can't be used for civilian purposes and can't be mass-produced, our semiconductor industry will forever remain a 'bonsai tree,' never growing up."

"What are we going to do then?" Old Chen asked anxiously. "Are we just going to leave this thing we worked so hard to create as a mere decoration?"

"Of course not."

Su Zheng stood up and walked to the blackboard behind him.

He wrote two words on the blackboard:

1. Dimensional reduction.

2. Games.

"The low yield rate is because we are testing according to 'military grade' standards."

Su Zheng explained, "For example, if one of the eight core units of a chip is faulty, it is scrap under military standards. But under civilian standards, we can disable the faulty core and sell it as a 'low-end' chip."

"Even some chips can't reach a clock speed of 10MHz, they can only run at 3MHz. Should we just throw them away? No, we can use them in places where high performance isn't required."

"Where high performance isn't needed?" Old Chen asked, puzzled. "For example?"

"For example... toys."

A sly glint flashed in Su Zheng's eyes.

He turned to Ye Xinyi and asked, "Xinyi, how much CPU frequency does the code for that 'block game' require?"

"1.79MHz is enough," Ye Xinyi replied instantly. "Only 2KB of memory is needed."

"Did you hear that?"

Su Zheng spread his hands. "Each of our 'scrap' chips can run at over 3MHz, and the memory is more than enough. To missiles, they're garbage. But to a game console that can only display black and white squares, they're... supercomputers!"

Old Chen's mouth dropped open. "You mean...we're going to use these high-tech chips...to make toys?"

"right!"

Su Zheng said firmly, "Aren't the Americans blocking our 'electronic toys'? Then we'll make a real 'electronic toy' to show them."

"I want to turn these 'discarded films' with substandard yield rates into treasures in the hands of children all over the world."

"I want to use the foreign exchange I earn from selling toys to buy better equipment, build bigger factories, and increase the yield rate from 3.5% to 35%, or even 95%!"

"This is called... using war to sustain war."

Su Zheng walked to the window and looked at the dark night sky outside.

In the east, a faint glimmer of dawn is appearing.

Comrades.

His voice was deep and powerful: "Lighting up the chip is only the first step. Next, we need to light up the entire industry chain."

"Since they want to trap us in darkness, then we'll use this spark to burn their market... to the ground!"

……

A week later.

Across the ocean, at Intel headquarters.

A vague intelligence report was delivered to the CEO's desk.

"Did the Chinese conduct a secret electronic experiment in the northwestern desert?"

The CEO frowned, looking at the few words in the intelligence report. "Suspected to be related to semiconductors? Hmph, probably just another copy of some old, outdated transistor from Russia."

He casually tossed the intelligence into the shredder.

"Ignore them. Continue to monitor the movements of the Japanese; they are our biggest concern. As for the Chinese... even if you give them another fifty years, they still won't create a miracle like 8086."

He turned around, looking at the bustling Silicon Valley outside the window, full of confidence.

He didn't know.

Just as he threw away that intelligence report.

In the far east, a military train loaded with "HX-1001 downgraded version" chips is roaring out of the desert.

They will be sent to contract manufacturers in the south and packed into gray plastic shells.

On the outer shell, a line of prominent pinyin was printed:

GAME BOY.

A global storm is about to descend.