Super Rich: Starting the game by going back ten years to buy Bitcoin

The next morning, Li Yichen ate breakfast at home and then drove to the company.

The moment the elevator doors opened on the 31st floor, a smell mixed with ozone and special coolant wafted out, carrying a cold, laboratory-like "technological smell."

Twenty Zhongqing robots stood quietly among the equipment, their dark gray alloy shells featuring sharp, smooth lines, and the indicator lights at their joints were off, resembling a line of soldiers waiting for orders.

Li Yichen walked to the control panel in the center of the floor, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

The console is made up of three huge curved screens, which are now completely black, like three quiet black lakes.

He took out his phone. The screen lit up automatically, and a chibi-style image of Ling'er with pigtails popped up. Her pixelated eyes blinked, and her voice, clear yet with a touch of ethereal electronic tone, spoke:

"Brother, all equipment has completed its self-check and is operating normally. The materials have been stored in the designated buffer area according to the process flow."

Li Yichen nodded.

He placed his phone on the console, screen facing up.

"Let's begin."

The words had barely left his mouth—

All three curved screens lit up simultaneously.

A waterfall of data began to flow, and lines of green code refreshed at a speed imperceptible to the naked eye, appearing before Li Yichen's eyes like a flowing river of light.

Inside the building, the indicator lights on the joints of all twenty Zhongqing robots suddenly turned blue with a "hum".

They start up silently, their alloy feet making a very faint "click" sound as they step onto the anti-static floor.

The first robot moved to the material buffer area, and its robotic arm precisely picked up a high-purity silicon ingot. Under the operating lights, the silicon ingot gleamed with a dark silver metallic luster, heavy as a compressed piece of moonlight.

The robot turned around and walked towards the laser interferometry positioning platform.

The clamps on the platform automatically open, firmly securing the silicon ingot.

The second and third robots followed in sync, starting the pre-processing—cleaning, polishing, and removing the surface oxide layer. Their movements were clean and efficient, without any unnecessary steps.

Li Yichen leaned back in his chair, watching Ling'er provide real-time feedback on every parameter on the screen.

Temperature, pressure, concentration, time...

All the data fluctuated smoothly within the preset thresholds, like a tamed wild beast.

He closed his eyes.

The complete chip manufacturing process flowchart in my mind is as clear as a brand.

From silicon ingot purification to wafer dicing, from photoresist coating to ion implantation, and then to metal interconnect layer deposition—every step, every detail, and every potential point of error is etched deep into his consciousness.

This is not learning, this is not memorization.

It is a complete production technology that is directly "injected" into the system and can be implemented immediately.

He opened his eyes.

On the console screen, the first wafer has completed its initial processing and is being transferred by the robotic arm into the chamber of the atomic layer deposition coating system.

The chamber door closed silently.

The internal air pressure begins to change.

Special rare earth materials are vaporized at high temperatures and deposited uniformly on the wafer surface with atomic-level thickness through precision nozzles.

This step is the core of the photonic current-carrying chip.

Traditional silicon-based chips transmit information through electron movement, while photonic current-carrying chips utilize "excitons" generated by specific materials under photoexcitation as information carriers.

The carrier mobility is three orders of magnitude higher than that of silicon-based wafers.

The heat generation is reduced to almost negligible levels.

The performance bottleneck has been completely broken.

Li Yichen stared at the real-time monitoring screen.

Inside the chamber, a very faint, almost imperceptible fluorescent glow began to appear on the wafer surface.

That's a sign of successful exciton material deposition.

His fingers, which were resting on his knees, curled slightly.

It became.

-

One week.

For the next week, Li Yichen didn't leave that floor.

When he got hungry, Ji Yanran would bring his lunchbox to the elevator. He would finish it in a few bites, his eyes still glued to the screen.

When I get sleepy, I wrap myself in a blanket and doze off on the cot next to the control panel. Sometimes I sleep for two hours, sometimes only forty minutes. When I wake up, I wash my face and continue staring at the data stream.

My phone vibrates occasionally.

Most of the messages were work-related; he would glance at them and then hand them over to Ling'er to handle.

Only once did the tremor originate from Xiao Yuqing.

He swiped the screen.

Several voice messages popped up in quick succession. Clicking on them revealed Xiao Yuqing's joyful voice; even through the receiver, you could hear the happiness of finding a treasure.

"Little Li! I found the shop! It's on the street next to the Lujiazui IFC!"

"It's huge, over 200 square meters!"

"The key is the rent! Guess how much it is per month?"

"Only 20,000! The landlord said it's been vacant for too long and he's in a hurry to rent it out, so he's lowered the price! I'm so lucky!"

"I've already signed the contract, and the renovations will start in a couple of days!"

"You absolutely have to come when it opens!"

After hearing this, Li Yichen's lips curled into a slight smile.

Of course, he wouldn't tell her that the shop was now owned by him.

He wouldn't tell her that the 20,000 yuan monthly rent was collected "symbolicly" by someone Ji Yanran arranged for him.

He replied with a text message:

"Congratulations on finding a bargain. I'm busy with important matters right now, so you'll have to manage the jewelry store yourself. I promise I'll be there on opening day."

After sending the message, I placed my phone face down on the console and continued watching the screen.

An ion beam etching machine is patterning a wafer after exciton material has been deposited.

Under the control of a precise electromagnetic field, sub-nanometer-scale ion beams, like top-notch sculptors, etch intricate circuit patterns onto the surface of a wafer.

The precision requirements for this step are abnormally high.

Traditional lithography machines require multiple exposures and immersion techniques to barely achieve linewidths of a few nanometers.

Ion beam etching skips the photolithography step and uses charged particles to bombard the material surface for physical etching.

Higher precision.

It is more controllable.

The key is--

It completely bypassed the lithography machine.

Li Yichen looked at the etching depth data displayed on the screen in real time.

0.5 nanometers.

Line width is 0.5 nanometers.

The trench depth is three nanometers.

The error is controlled within ±0.01 nanometers.

perfect.

-

Another week has passed.

Li Yichen's stubble had reappeared on his chin, and the dark circles under his eyes were even deeper than when he was working on supercomputing on the 32nd floor a month ago.

But he was in a state of extreme excitement.

On the console screen, the final step—the deposition of the metal interconnect layer—is underway.

Silvery-white metallic material is evenly coated in the etched trenches using a sputtering process, forming a network of wires inside the wafer.

The progress bar has reached 100%.

The robotic arm removes the wafer, which has completed all the processes, from the deposition chamber and transfers it to the dicing table.

The diamond blade fell.

The wafer is cut into individual chips the size of a fingernail.

The robotic arm picked up one of the items and delivered it to the control panel in front of Li Yichen.

Li Yichen reached out his hand.

The chip gently landed in his palm.

It's cold.

It's so light you can barely feel it.

The silver-gray casing has a smooth, mirror-like surface and extremely cleanly cut edges. Under the operating lights, it gleams with a restrained, metallic matte sheen.

Li Yichen stared at the chip in his palm.

My breath stopped for a moment.

The heart inside my chest beat heavily and slowly, each beat feeling like it was hitting my ribs.

It became.

He did it.

Using a process completely different from existing technologies, bypassing the lithography machine, they created the world's first photonic current-carrying wafer.

0.5 nanometers.

He held the chip in his hand, gently rubbing its smooth surface with the pad of his thumb.

"Ling'er".

"I'm here, brother."

"Let's test the performance of this chip."

"Okay, brother."

On the console screen, the data stream started scrolling again.

Ling'er activated all available testing equipment on the 30th floor—high-precision oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, thermal imagers, and power consumption testing platforms—and put them at full power.

One minute later.

The test results popped up.

The list of parameters is densely packed, with each item followed by a number and an exaggeratedly high percentage comparison.

Computing power: Compared to the most advanced 1.6-nanometer silicon-based chips, it is 1,200 percent more powerful.

Power consumption: Reduced by 95%.

Heat generation: When running at full load for one hour at room temperature, the temperature rise does not exceed 0.5 degrees Celsius.

Yield rate: 80%.

Li Yichen read through each item one by one.

With each line I read, the corners of my mouth curved upwards a little more.

Finally, he leaned back in his chair and exhaled a long, slow breath.

It became.

It really happened.

The most advanced chips in the world today are only 1.6 nanometers in size.

That's already the limit of lithography machines and existing semiconductor physics theories; unless a new approach is found, it's impossible to break through that limit.

And now-

The chip in his hand has a linewidth of 0.5 nanometers.

Its performance is more than ten times better.

Most importantly—this thing doesn't have a lithography machine, EUV, or ASML.

They use completely different material systems and completely different process routes.

Even if you were to throw this chip into TSMC, Intel, or Samsung's top laboratories, and have them disassemble it, scan it inch by inch with an electron microscope, and analyze it bit by bit with an energy dispersive spectroscopy analyzer—

Without the complete technical blueprint in his mind, without the precise proportions of those special rare earth materials, without the electromagnetic field control parameters for ion beam etching...

Even if they study it for three to five years, they still won't be able to replicate it.

Li Yichen held the chip up to his eyes, facing the light of the operating lamp.

A small patch of cool white light reflected off the surface of the chip, like a miniature star.

"Ling'er".

"Brother, I'm here."

"Have you memorized the manufacturing process of this chip in my hand?"

"I've memorized it all, brother." Ling'er's voice came from the phone, tinged with a hint of pride. "Every process parameter, every equipment operation command, all data streams and feedback signals are all recorded in the core database."

"Okay." Li Yichen put down the chip. "The rest of the mass production is up to you. Use these devices to control the robots and produce 24/7."

"No problem, brother." Ling'er's chibi-style image wiggled its little feet on the phone screen. "Leave it to me."

Li Yichen stood up and stretched his stiff neck.

The joints made a soft "crack" sound.

He walked over to the ion beam etching machine and placed his palm on the cold metal casing.

"With the current equipment here, how many chips can this production line produce per day, running at full capacity 24 hours a day?"

The data stream on the screen paused for a moment.

Ling'er is performing real-time calculations.

Three seconds later.

"Brother, based on the theoretical capacity of the equipment and the cycle time of the process, under the premise of fully automated robot control, zero downtime, and an 80% yield rate, this production line can produce about a thousand chips per day."

One thousand pieces.

Li Yichen repeated the number.

He nodded.

That's enough.

At this stage, the production capacity of this equipment and this site has exceeded his expectations.

Once his chip factory is built—

The number of equipment has increased tenfold, and the site area has increased a hundredfold.

The daily output at that time will not be a thousand pieces.

There are tens of thousands, or even more.

By then...

Li Yichen turned around and looked out the floor-to-ceiling window.

Outside the window are the well-arranged office buildings of Lujiazui, their glass curtain walls reflecting the afternoon sun so bright it makes one's eyes sting.

His gaze went beyond the tall buildings, looking into the distance.

By then—

It's not like other countries are holding China by the neck anymore.

It was the Great Xia Dynasty.

Or rather, his future technology company.

To strangle someone.