The Millennium Semiconductor Survival Guide

Sony is an out-and-out leader in consumer electronics at the moment, and has a strong influence in all fields involved, almost ranking in the top five.

To make decoding chips for Apple, from a few million pieces to tens of millions, and for Sony, if it can enter Sony’s mainstream production line, it can reach tens of millions from the beginning. There is no such possibility that it will not be sold.

It seems that as long as the product is made, consumers will be willing to pay.

Even after twenty years, Sony's smartphones have no voice in the global market, but Sony still has a place in other consumer electronics fields.

Therefore, Guan Jianying hopes to reach a long-term cooperative relationship with Sony, and he believes that the cooperation between Xinxin Technology and Sony has a natural basis.

Sony and Xinxin Technology have cooperated around Bluetooth chips before, and Sony owns its own large and small first-party game studios, and has always been a partner of Riot Games and Mphone.

Therefore, there is a basis for mutual trust between the two parties.

For Guan Jianying personally, Xinxin Technology’s previous sales network all relied on Zhou Xin’s business layout. As the vice president of Xinxin Technology, he did not play a big role in business relationship and cooperation. Make the most of your experience in the chip industry.

Guan Jianying also hopes to use the comprehensive cooperation with Sony Group as an opportunity to bring Xinxin Technology's influence in the field of mobile chips to a higher level.

And he is confident that if Sony chooses a new chip for its handheld, Nintendo will also be able to catch it.

The one who knows you best will always be your competitor. Sony chose Xinxin Technology. As long as the price of Xinxin is right, Nintendo has no reason to refuse.

Being able to become a partner of Sony and Nintendo at the same time means that Xinxin has become one of the most important chip suppliers in the handheld field.

Suehiro Nakamura showed a distressed expression: "Guan Sang, as you know, I am only the head of the Semiconductor Division, not to mention the Sony Group, I don't even have the right to make decisions about Sony Games.

It's somewhat beyond my jurisdiction for you to talk to me about this. "

Nakamura Suehiro has a high status in Sony's R\u0026D department. To be precise, Nakamura has a high status in the entire Sony system. But he will be marginalized in the near future, because Sony's semiconductor division made a serious mistake in the development of the PSP chip.

This mistake caused the biggest shortcoming of Sony's PSP handheld to appear on the chip.

Guan Jianying said: "Nakamura, I know what you mean, I also have something to remind you this time, you said before that you want to use Toshiba's most advanced 90nm process, using 90nm process can improve a lot of performance.

However, according to the research results of Xinxin's research department, if the 90nm process is adopted, but the research and development of ultra-low K value dielectric materials does not keep up, it will cause serious leakage current problems.

This problem has led to the adoption of advanced manufacturing processes, and the power consumption has not been reduced, but has increased. "

Later, many manufacturers encountered similar problems when they entered 90nm from 0.13 microns. The leakage problem caused by ultra-low K value dielectric materials caused Intel to directly skip the 90nm node and enter the 0.65nm node.

Suehiro Nakamura was marginalized precisely because of this mistake, and was assigned to the Nakamura Research Institute named after him not long after.

It is precisely because of the leakage problem of the Sony PSP chip that the first batch of PSP chips can run up to 333MHz, but due to the leakage problem, the highest speed can only be 222MHz.

At that time, Sony even issued a special announcement: For PSP produced before March 2006, the CPU runs at 222MHz, and for those produced after March 2006, the CPU can run at 366MHz, and users can choose by themselves.

Nakamura Suehiro narrowed his eyes: "Guan Sang, Xinxin has profound attainments in the field of mobile chips, and your A1E chip has brought the 130nm process to the limit, even better than the chip we designed through the 90nm process.

Our R\u0026D department has been trying to circumvent Xinxin's patents, but there is no way to do it. I believe in Xinxin's strength in this field, but the most advanced process that Xinxin has used so far should only be 130nm?

At present, there is no chip foundry manufacturer on the market that has started to promote 90nm process chips on a large scale, and our chips are only produced in small quantities in the fab jointly built by Sony and Toshiba.

How did you know there was such a problem? "

Nakamura is very cautious, everyone has a good relationship, and he doesn't want to see Sony being infiltrated by Xinxin Technology like a sieve.

Guan Jianying said: "Because our upcoming second-generation Mphone will also use 90nm technology, it has been two years since the first-generation Mphone. A large part of the reason why Matrix has not released a new generation of Mphone is because of chip performance. No breakthrough has been achieved yet.

When we cooperated with chip manufacturers such as IBM, Texas Instruments, and Samsung, Xinxin Technology's A2 series chips generally found leakage current problems in ultra-low K value dielectric materials during tape-out.

So as soon as you told us that Sony's new generation of handhelds will adopt the most advanced chip technology, I guessed that you would also face this problem. "

Nakamura thought, so I leaked it? I just said such a vague sentence, Guan Sang guessed so many things?

He couldn't help feeling admiration in his heart, and then quickly asked: "Xinxin Technology has encountered the same problem, it seems that Guan Sang has thought of a solution?"

Suehiro Nakamura is obviously very concerned. If there is a problem with the PSP chip, he will be the first to die.

Guan Jianying nodded: "Xinxin Technology started to apply ultra-low K dielectric materials two years ago, and now it has launched a new generation of silicon oxide technology to solve this problem.

We call it Black Diamond film, and its effective dielectric constant will be less than 3.0. At the same time, after adopting Xinxin Technology's unique dual damascene process, the capacitance value can be reduced by 25% to 35%. "

This is the result of Xinxin Technology's R\u0026D center in Silicon Valley. To be precise, Zhou Xin established a R\u0026D center in Silicon Valley after he successfully sold Quora. There are R\u0026D centers at the software level and semiconductor R\u0026D centers.

Among them, ultra-low-K dielectric materials have been one of the important research and development topics of the Semiconductor R\u0026D Center in the past two years, because Zhou Xin naturally knows that ultra-low-K dielectric materials will become more and more important in semiconductor materials in the future, and he also generally knows that American How Applied Materials is solving this problem.

In VLSI, with the improvement of device integration and further reduction of delay time, low-k dielectric is required as an insulating material to ensure high-speed performance of devices and control energy consumption. With the shrinking of the chip size, the requirements for low-K media are getting higher and higher.

This is called the low-K precursor material in the semiconductor precursor material in the future big A semiconductor market research report.

Guided by leading ideas, Xinxin Technology's R\u0026D center in Silicon Valley is making rapid progress. The black diamond technology based on the 90nm process has been developed. This technology is plainly doped with carbon in silicon oxide, and at the same time adopts a dual damascene process. It can perfectly solve the problem of interfacial bonding between low-dielectric films and between low-dielectric films and metal wiring, so that the adhesion coefficient between low-dielectric films is greatly improved.

Nakamura repeatedly praised: "It is really amazing Xinxin Technology, which has been monopolized by Applied Materials before in this field. I did not expect Xinxin Technology to achieve technological breakthroughs in such a short period of time."

Applied Materials is the most important raw material and equipment company in the semiconductor field, the largest supplier of many upstream materials, and the first chip equipment company to enter China.

Suehiro Nakamura will not doubt the authenticity of Guan Jianying's words, because if he is good in the field of materials, he is good, and if he is not good, he is not good.

Since Guan Jianying will bring it up, it means that they hope to cooperate with Sony, and the ultra-low K dielectric material of Xinxin Technology will also be used for trial by Sony.

Guan Jianying said: "Our R\u0026D center in Silicon Valley has a large number of experienced engineers and R\u0026D personnel. Xinxin Technology not only has sufficient experience in the field of mobile chip design, but also has rich experience in semiconductor materials and chip foundry.

Well, maybe the experience of chip foundry is limited, we really cannot produce 90nm chips at present, but Xinxin Technology definitely has the ability to design 90nm chips. "

Guan Jianying also does not want to help Sony produce chips. Neither Xinxin itself nor Huaguo's local chip manufacturers currently have the capacity to produce 90nm chips.

Not to mention Huaguo's chip manufacturers, TSMC is currently stuck with no progress.

So Guan Jianying just wants to help Sony design 90nm chips, and at the same time sell the ultra-low K dielectric materials they developed to Sony, and sell 130nm or even lower process chips to Nintendo.

For Guan Jianying, coming to Neon this time also belongs to marketing.

Nakamura said: "I need time to verify whether the chips we manufacture really have such problems. If so, then I think Sony's fab will not mind buying ultra-low K dielectric materials from Xinxin.

Not only Sony, but also Toshiba, NEC, Panasonic, etc., and Neon's chip manufacturers will not refuse to cooperate with Xinxin Technology on semiconductor materials.

As for the mobile chip design of Sony's future handhelds, we can also consider cooperating with Xinxin. "

In the company, everyone talked about more formal topics. At night, in the izakaya, Nakamura Suehiro and Guan Jianying sat side by side, and Nakamura was much more relaxed.

Guan Jianying has always been very relaxed.

"Guan Sang, compared with Sony, the development of Xinxin Technology in the past few years is dizzying. Your development speed is too fast, just like the semiconductor companies of Neon in the 1980s.

There are still some differences from the neon companies at that time. At that time, a large number of excellent companies emerged in the field of neon semiconductors. At present, it seems that only Xinxin has a strong presence in Huaguo. Compared with other Huaguo semiconductor companies, there is a clear gap with Xinxin. "

Nakamura feels that he is older than Guan Jianying. After joining Sony, he experienced the golden age of Neon Enterprise in the 1980s. minister.

These are the core business departments within Sony. Nakamura has even developed the VEGA brand, and led VEGA to become the No. 1 TV brand in the neon market.

From the 1980s to the millennium, Nakamura almost witnessed the decline of the neon semiconductor company, and witnessed the gradual change of neon from vigorous to stagnant water.

Guan Jianying said: "The development of Xinxin Technology is similar to the development of Neon Semiconductor in the past. We are all based on the foundation of Silicon Valley.

It’s just that unlike Neon companies that accept a large number of technology transfers from Silicon Valley, Xinxin Technology is more inclined to recruit a large number of experienced R\u0026D personnel, and then conduct independent research and development on this basis. Our autonomy is stronger than that of Neon in the 1980s. Be stronger. "

After clinking glasses, Nakamura and Guan Jianying said: "We came here because we accepted a lot of technology transferred from Silicon Valley and took over the production capacity transferred from Silicon Valley, and secondly because we had no money at the time.

At that time, Sony was not like Xinxin Technology, which was backed by a strong major shareholder. Newman had almost unlimited bullets to support Xinxin Technology. Sony was different. Sony needed to achieve profitability as soon as possible.

The pressure we face is completely different. It was not until Sony gained a foothold in the TV business that Sony had the energy to invest resources in research and development.

As long as it is a physical manufacturing enterprise, it can be more or less aware of the importance of research and development, but sometimes it really does not have this resource.

When Guan Sang failed to start a business a few years ago, I really wanted to recruit you to Sony at that time, but before I went to Silicon Valley to have a face-to-face chat with you, I received an email from you to China. "

Nakamura and Guan Jianying seem to have forgotten their friendship. Guan Jianying said: "Joining Xinxin Technology was an accident. Newman's personal charm and influence at the time were too strong. He briefly told me what Xinxin was going to do. I couldn't help feeling that this was an opportunity and I had to take it.

At that time, Newman had just sold Quora to Time Warner at an unimaginably sky-high price. In Silicon Valley at that time, Newman almost had a natural aura, and everyone wanted to cooperate with Newman.

Under this premise, Newman says to you, come on, help me to work, it's hard to say no, and you don't even need to think about it.

Even in integrated circuits, Newman has not proven his field before. "

After hearing this, Nakamura said with a smile: "Newman is indeed a man with great personal charm. Neon's "an.an" magazine holds a "Favorite Man" poll every year. Newman has always been ranked first in the most ideal lover, second The person is Takuya Kimura.

Newman is indeed the envy of the outside world in all areas of unimaginable success, including semiconductors and consumer electronics. It's hard for me to imagine that a person can have such a strong energy and such a strong management ability.

When Xinxin Technology was established before, you went to be an executive. I thought Xinxin Technology would focus on the field of chip design, starting with some low-difficulty chip design. Newman also studied semiconductors, and he will also participate.

Xinxin Technology is equivalent to some gambling nature, but I did not expect Newman's ambition to be so big. Xinxin Technology's business scope spans chip design, chip manufacturing, chip raw materials and chip equipment. "

June is going to pass again, and the crow degenerates back to 4k crow in June, alas~