During the Chinese New Year, in the Future Entrepreneurship Square of Jinan High-tech Zone, there is still a group of people who deal with "millimeter precision" in their posts, and the sensors in their hands are related to the flight safety of an aircraft.
"Paint" on a sensor the size of a coin
The accuracy can reach 1/10,000
It's not a holiday yet. On the morning of the second day of the Lunar New Year, the doorman of the Future Entrepreneurship Plaza in Licheng District, Jinan City, was a little surprised to see Li Chuanhao walking into the park again.
Uncle, there is still some work to be done. Li Chuanhao responded. This is his first year of official work, and the first year he has not returned home.
As long as he plunged into the laboratory, Li Chuanhao's heart calmed down again. There are more than ten people who are still on the job like him in Shandong Zhongkesil Technology, and when they walk into the production laboratory here, it seems to be isolated from the world. The staff are busy on the one-foot-square operating table, and the only sound of machines running and the occasional collision between equipment and the desktop can be heard in the laboratory.
Look at the sensors on the shelves, they are all waiting to be tested", Zhang Jing, director of the production department, introduced, "A few years ago, we received an urgent order, and we still need staff to catch up with the construction period." ”
What is a Sensor? Li Chuanhao explained: "When people come to open the door, people leave the door closed; Smart sensor lights, fire alarms, ......These devices are inseparable from the application of 'sensors'. The sensors they produce are used in high-tech fields such as aerospace, meteorology, instrumentation, and lithography machines.
In addition to the hard shell, an airplane has thousands of ultra-high-precision sensors inside. The sensors transmit different frequencies, which are then recorded by the data logger, so that the flight status of the aircraft can be grasped at all times. "Just as humans need a 'nervous system', airplanes also need 'sensory organs', which are the entrance to data collection and the front end of intelligent perception of the outside world. Li Chuanhao said.
I saw that there was a professional testing equipment on the workbench of each staff member, and the sensors were placed in a box, only the size of a coin. Zhang Jing introduced that the core components of the sensor are a chip that senses pressure and a circuit board, and the staff holds a soldering head to connect them, as if "painting" on a "coin".
For a large aircraft, a sensor is like a small ant, but its accuracy is related to the flight safety of the aircraft. "We've increased the accuracy to 1/10,000, so even if an insect's tentacles touch you, this sensor can accurately detect the amount of pressure it is exactly. Zhang Jing said.
However, many of the production processes of controlling accuracy still need to be completed manually, "For example, when we weld, each welding point is only a few millimeters apart, and we must ensure that it cannot be welded, closed, or overwelded; Even the amount of glue used to fix the pressure-sensitive film will cause poor signal output and attenuation, which will affect the performance of the later test. ”
The closer we get to the holidays, the more we need to be calm. Zhang Jing said that the production of each sensor takes three months to half a year from the initial tape-out to the intermediate assembly, and then to the subsequent rounds of testing. "It can be said that the time is tight and the task is heavy. ”
Go both ways with Jinan
Every month you can solve new problems
This new batch of test data was copied to me. The first thing Li Chuanhao did when he came to the company was to put on an experimental coat and walk into the production workshop to take a new batch of testing data and import it into the computer.
R&D capability is the core competitiveness of an enterprise in the market, the company's research of ultra-high-precision pressure sensor belongs to the branch of the aerospace information industry, and the core technology of this is the research and development of silicon resonant pressure sensor chips.
In 2019, Wang Junbo, director of the National Key Sensor Research and Development Laboratory, saw the potential and policy support dividends of Jinan's development in the field of aerospace information, and settled the product transformation company in Jinan, which has more than 20 years of experience in the design and manufacture of high-precision silicon resonant pressure sensors.
We are one of the few companies in China that can commercialize silicon resonance, and the chips are independently developed, produced and manufactured by the company's team. At present, a variety of products not only fill the gap of localized high-precision pressure sensors in the domestic market. Li Chuanhao said.
In 2020, Li Chuanhao came to the company to study with two mentors, and his graduation project was around the research and development of sensitive cores in sensors. Seeing the broad prospects of the company's development in the field of silicon resonance, he was once determined to enter the "big laboratory" to participate in major research and development projects, but did not choose to go to a scientific research institute in Beijing after graduation, but stayed in Jinan.
It's not that I chose Jinan, it's that Jinan has the platform I want, and it can be said that we are in a two-way process. Li Chuanhao said that for scientific researchers, it is a very meaningful thing for the knowledge learned to finally be applied in practice and fed back to the society.
In the past, sensor production can only be carried out in small batches of prototype production, only a few hundred production capacity per year, later with the landing of Shandong Zhongkesil technology, some automated sensor assembly lines have been applied one after another, and the current annual production capacity of high-precision pressure sensors has exceeded 10,000.
Now I can do what I love every day, which is very fulfilling, and in 2023, I will have new problems to break through almost every month, which is very fulfilling. Li Chuanhao said.
In 2023, Li Chuanhao's biggest achievement is to achieve chip miniaturization. "If the chip is large, the number of chips coming out of a unit wafer is not very large, and it can maintain its performance while miniaturizing it, and the test yield and product production efficiency of the later product will be faster. ”
But he did not dare to relax, at present, all cities across the country are actively laying out future industries, and scientific researchers are often facing "involution". "Sometimes some assays don't work as well as they should, but I don't waver because I know I'm standing on the shoulders of my predecessors and I'm on the right path. ”
In between work, Li Chuanhao stood up and looked out the window: "You see, when I came here three years ago, there was still an empty land in the south, and since last year, a new industrial park has been built again. "After the New Year, a large number of new high-tech industries will settle here, driven by innovation, build a platform here, educate the main body, and continue to contribute to economic development and future industrial layout.