"I have carefully studied the UWB chip you designed. It has a certain value and is enough to support a small and medium-sized semiconductor company.
If you do everything from design to manufacturing yourself, then semiconductor companies with hundreds of millions in revenue will have no problem.
But from a market perspective, this segment is still too small. "
On the eve of the ISSCC conference, Zhou Xin finally started going to the laboratory frequently.
So that the other doctors under Hu Zhengming were very surprised. For them, they had only heard of Zhou Xin and had never seen him before.
Everyone still wants to look familiar to such a big shot.
But when Zhou Xin came to the laboratory, most of the time he just said hello to them briefly, and then ran to Hu Zhengming's office to chat with him alone on some key issues.
After carefully studying Zhou Xin’s UWB chip patent, Hu Zhengming talked to Zhou Xin: “It is undeniable that the Ultra-MIMO architecture developed by diversity antennas is more meaningful than the traditional cable method.
And provides greater range and higher link reliability. "
When Hu Zhengming paused to drink water, Zhou Xin added: "And it has stronger radiofrequency penetration."
Hu Zhengming continued: “But the problem is that the cost is also high.
If the home video IP network uses UWB chips, the cost will be much higher than the traditional cable model. "
Error-free transmission of information is possible even in the presence of high interference signals.
The only problem is that there are still too few application scenarios.
The 802.11 wireless standard was released in 1997, but slower speeds and expensive hardware have been the biggest obstacles to its popularity.
The 802.11b standard that became popular later had not yet been developed.
The 802.11 standard is the original standard of WiFi, with a transmission rate of only 2Mbit/s. After 802.11b, the rate increased to 11Mbit/s.
In the later 5GHz frequency band, the transmission rate will be further greatly increased, that is, 54Mbit/s.
In the mobile Internet era, UWB chips are widely used in the field of consumer electronics. For example, the iPhone's retrieval function is based on centimeter-level positioning based on UWB technology.
"There is also a key issue, that is, UWB chips are military chips and cannot be used in civilian applications without FCC approval."
FCC: Federal Communications Commission.
Compared with traditional UWB technology, Zhou's newly designed UWB dual chipset technology increases transmission distance, transmission rate and radio frequency penetration.
In other words, a home WIFI system based on UWB dual chipsets can achieve data streaming transmission of more than 100Mbps.
Zhou Xin was dumbfounded. He didn't know that UWB technology in this era still needs a license to be used in the civilian field.
But he quickly thought of a solution: "There should be no relevant regulations in China. We can build the UWB company in China."
Hu Zhengming nodded: "It should be possible, I don't know much about China's communications regulations.
However, the price-performance ratio of this thing is limited, and current applications do not require such high-speed traffic.
There are no application scenarios in Amerikan, and there are even less application scenarios in China. "
China's backbone broadband expansion project only started in July 1998. After the launch, it was expanded to 155M. Even if you use UWB technology to build a 100Mbps home network, China Telecom cannot support your high broadband demand.
Simply put, this technology is too high-end and is not applicable now.
This is the generation gap brought about by the times, an unsolvable problem.
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 as a Chinese, your product is destined to fail to gain the trust of Amerikan.
But purely from a technical perspective, this is definitely a good enough technology.
It's just that no application scenarios have been discovered yet. "Hu Zhengming finally made a conclusion.
Zhou Xin’s first patent amazed Hu Zhengming from a technical perspective.
It’s just the limitations of application scenarios that prevent this technology from exerting its due value for the time being.
Zhou Xin was a little frustrated. No wonder Samsung would transfer this technology. It turned out that it could not find large-scale application scenarios.
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 sufficient funds are available, Zhou Xin plans to establish a specialized integrated circuit research institute in Silicon Valley.
"Well, shame on this technology."
"Normally, this is a dilemma that researchers often encounter.
Many times your inventions are of no use at the moment, and it may not be until a few years, ten or even decades later that its true use is discovered.
For example, Kao Kun experimentally verified the feasibility of optical fiber communication in 1966, and it was not until ten years later that the first optical fiber communication system was born.
This is the norm. "Hu Zhengming comforted.
"In addition, you need to give a report at the ISSCC. Are you ready?"
"It has been prepared for a long time. This kind of reporting is a small case."
“Many of my friends in the integrated circuit field are very interested in you, and many people will definitely listen to your report.
Don't embarrass me. "
Hu Zhengming was completely joking. With Zhou Xin's achievements, even if he streaked at the ISSCC, everyone would think he was genuine.
"I'm ready, and I have some new ideas to share with you."
...
"Klassen, long time no see, this is my student Newman!"
San Francisco is the permanent venue for ISSCC conferences. Hu Zhengming has been here many times, and the venue is as familiar as returning to his own home.
Since he has not yet published the most famous research result of his research career, the FinEFTP architecture, he is now only a relatively well-known scholar.
Klassen stood 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.
Newman, hello, my name is Klassen, Theo Klassen, nice to meet you, Chenming and I often chat about you in emails.
He often showed off to me that he had a good student. "
Klassen is an industry tycoon. 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 profound attainments in the field of automation. He gave the opening speech at the Design Automation Conference held by IEEE a year later.
ISSCC will be attended by a large number of researchers from academia and industry, and there will usually be some other agendas and presentations before the plenary paper meeting.
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 am just a student in the field of integrated circuits. I have a lot to learn from senior practitioners."
Simply speaking from the semiconductor field, companies upstream and downstream in the industry, no matter how big or small, will not talk about real things.
They may even say something specious in order to mislead competitors.
On the contrary, the academic community is much more honest, and there is a lot of useful information every year.
