He Jianming s All the Way to the Core is concerned about the great cause of the country and the na

He Jianming, famous writer, publisher, Chinese Writers Association.

Vice Chairman of the 7th, 8th and 9th Sessions, Director of the Reportage Committee of the Chinese Writers Association, Dean of Mao Dun Academy of Literature.

Testimonials

The chip is small and micro, but it is the "important weapon of the country" related to the rejuvenation and modernization of the nation. As a leader of contemporary Chinese reportage, He Jianming has always been concerned about the great cause of the country and the nation, and has written a wonderful chapter of the times with strong ink and color. This new work "All the Way to the Shocking Core" deeply describes the core story of the strategic decision-making and specific implementation of the development of China's chip industry. "All the Way to the Core" is actually a kind of "Chinese heart" that highlights the national spirit. The work is rich in information, open and subtle, the narrative is insightful, the ups and downs, and the skillful national narrative once again summons the reader's interest in reading.

Ding Xiaoyuan.

Chapter 1 Opening the era of "core making".

There are always some extraordinary coincidences in the world: from noon on November 30, 2022, the land of Jiangsu and Zhejiang will be cloudy and rainy, and the cold wind will be sluggish. I stayed in a hotel in Pudong by the Huangpu River in Shanghai, and I watched the cold light rain in the window, and then the rain was ...... with snowflakes fluttering in the airIt's rare to think of this kind of weather in Shanghai this month. Just when I was thinking about something, the news of "Comrade ** passed away" suddenly flashed on my mobile phone, and my heart suddenly tightened: What a coincidence! When I wrote about him, I even thought that his news appeared in front of our eyes......

Yes. It is precisely because of him that China's chip industry has made a great strategic decision, which is the "909 Project" plan.

For a long time, many major events of our country and the Party have been referred to by numerical codes, and they are usually some major national projects, projects, or strategies with great secrecy, such as the "863" plan.

The "909 Project" plan is the code name of the decision made by the first comrade as the core on the development of the semiconductor (chip) industry in the 90s of the 20th century. In the first few days of Comrade ***'s death, commemorative articles about him continued to appear in newspapers and on the Internet, giving us the opportunity to revisit this leader of the Communist Party of China who made outstanding contributions to China's reform and opening up, and to have a more comprehensive understanding and understanding. In many memorial articles and video materials before his death, I saw a text related to the "909 Project" of China Semiconductor: ** said that in 1989, after I presided over the work, I decided to start the "908 Project". * By 2020, the international level of microelectronics technology will develop to 14 nanometers. We should be soberly aware that we cannot buy core technology and must rely on ourselves, but we will not be able to catch up with the world's advanced level by introducing new production capacity from generation to generation. We researchers must fight for each other, otherwise developed countries will always be stuck in our necks in terms of core technologies.

What is Project 908? Why did the later "909 Project" come on? And what is the relationship between them? To understand these problems, we must first understand the history of China's semiconductor industry, and China's semiconductors have grown up under the influence of the development of the advanced semiconductor industry in the West.

On the scientific journey of modern industrial products, we naturally want to thank the contributions made by scientists in some developed countries, and it is their inventions and creations that make us have the Internet and mobile phones today, and we can easily query all kinds of information to obtain the needs of life with just a few clicks of a few keys while sitting at home. This would have been inconceivable thirty or fifty years ago.

Yes. As a semiconductor expert said: In the past century and the next century, the biggest factor in reforming mankind will not be politics and religion, nor military and ideology, but semiconductors related to electronics. Believe it or not, the world is really not at all like the "Great Revolutionary Century" of the previous hundred years.

What has changed us is no longer war and politics, but the things that are becoming indispensable in life and that allow you to easily and quickly access information - computers and mobile phones, and all the work, life and cognition that extend to them.

China, which was once in a state of farming, could not be compared with the developed countries of the West that relied on the industrial revolution in the past two or three hundred years, when our ancestors were still relying on "fortune telling" to ** the future, the British ElBaradei had already discovered that silver sulfide would produce resistance changes with temperature changes, which was the "semiconductor phenomenon", which was in 1833. In 1839 and 1873, French scientists and British scientists discovered new phenomena of semiconductors. In 1879, Mr. Hall's definition of the relationship between magnetic fields and induced voltages historically found a clear "Hall effect" for semiconductors. Then in 1904, the British scientist Fleming invented the world's first electron tube, and since then semiconductors have come to the center of the human stage, and in the following 100 years, semiconductors have almost "conductors" all fields and all bodies in the world, and almost all human beings have entered its "tube" ......

China is not a little slower on this path. A hundred years ago, there were almost no people in our entire country who knew semiconductors, and there were no such scientists or even enthusiasts who touched this thing. But then there was, and once the Chinese touched it, they almost caught up with the Westerners who had been groping in the field of electronics for nearly a hundred years.

As soon as we talk about chips and semiconductors now, we are very superstitious about "Microsoft" and "TSMC", including our own "Huawei", etc., in fact, the older generation of Chinese semiconductors are very good!

In China's semiconductor industry, there is such a saying: North Huang and South Xie, a man and a woman, across heaven and earth. Here is the founder of China's semiconductors, Mr. Huang Kun and Ms. Xie Xide. One of them is a professor at Peking University and the other is a professor at Fudan University, and they are both people with stories.

Mr. Huang Kun is very legendary, in August 1977, ** once said bitterly for him at a *** meeting: "We did not treat semiconductor expert Huang Kun well, Peking University does not use him, I use it!" Let him go to the semiconductor research institute as a director ......”

The person who can make *** say such things must be an amazing person. Indeed, Huang Kun's prestige and qualifications in the Chinese physics community can be called "quacking". At the age of 18, he became a physics student at Yenching University; At the age of 23, he became a senior disciple of Wu Dayou, the "father of Chinese physics", and his classmates included Yang Zhenning and others. In 1945, Huang Kun went to the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom to study, and his supervisor was Mott, a master of solid-state physics and a Nobel laureate in physics. Huang Kun, who was taught by a famous teacher, soon became a "physics master", and he proposed the theory that impurity defects in solids lead to X-ray diffusion, which opened up a new field of C-ray research. Its "yellow diffuse scattering" is still an important name in the world physics community.

In the laboratory of a British university, the young Huang Kun also fell in love with the beautiful British girl Reese at first sight, and the two jointly created the "Huang-Rees theory".

As he approached the Nobel Prize, Huang Kun returned to his homeland and wrote to his classmate, Dr. Yang Zhenning, to describe the move: "I sincerely feel that China has us and does not have us, which is completely different. ”

In the fall of 1951, Huang Kun returned to Beijing and taught in the Department of Physics at Peking University. It was definitely a chance or natural coincidence: it was also this year, and at this time, that a young southern lady returned to her homeland from England with her husband to teach at Fudan University in Shanghai, also teaching physics courses.

This lady is Xie Xide. Born in the same year as the Chinese Communist Party, Xie Xide was also a physics genius, and her physicist father had a great influence on her, and in 1947 Xie Xide went to the United States to study at Smith College, and later transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study for a doctorate in physics. In 1951, Shehid made a detour to England because her husband, a biochemist, was in England.

Transistor development will be the future direction of physics, and China cannot do without semiconductors! After returning to China, when Huang Kun and Xie Xide taught the new courses of two prestigious schools, they invariably proposed their own strategic directions to the country. The reason why the two young physicists attached great importance to semiconductors was because during their study abroad, it happened that physicist Shockley and others invented the "point contact transistor amplifier", which immediately triggered a revolution in electronic transistors internationally. Shockley, also known as the "father of Silicon Valley", although his research was mainly for the U.S. Navy at the time, his new semiconductor theory and research direction has been regarded by his peers as "the most cutting-edge science that will change the future of the world" and has attracted unprecedented attention from developed countries. As young Chinese scholars, they are naturally sensitive to this development trend of the world's semiconductors, and they cannot help but be moved.

Well, this direction is related to the future of national scientific development, so the two of you are responsible for grasping this matter! The chief's words made Huang Kun and Xie Xide, who were one north and one south, tightly "tied" together. Soon, they accepted the "organization" arrangement, co-edited China's first textbook "Semiconductor Physics", and co-chaired the first batch of semiconductor backbone training courses in New China. This class later emerged a group of academicians and famous scholars, and became the leaders in the field of semiconductor chip manufacturing and R&D in China today.

In 1988, Xie Xide became the first female president of Fudan University. Mr. Huang Kun, who received special care, became the director of the Institute of Semiconductors of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2001, Mr. Huang Kun won the highest national science and technology award. Academician Huang Kun died in 2005, and Mr. Xie Xide left this world five years before Huang Kun. However, it is the "one man and one woman" in the north and one in the south that made China's semiconductor industry in the fifties and sixties of the 20th century once very close to the world's semiconductor development level and occupied a place.

As mentioned above, although at the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China, China's semiconductors were in the early stage of exploration, but under the influence and drive of professors such as Huang Kun and Xie Xide, Peking University, Fudan University, Jilin University, Xiamen University and Nanjing University and other universities have opened semiconductor professional courses, and soon established the Beijing Electron Tube Factory, and manufactured the first batch of germanium transistors and diodes in 1957, which is directly related to Lin Lanying, who brought back germanium single transistors from the United States. Shockley invented the germanium transistor at Bell Labs in the United States in 1947. That is, at that time our semiconductor level was only 10 years later than in the United States.

In 1960, China established two semiconductor R&D institutions, namely the Institute of Semiconductors of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the 13th Research Institute of the Fourth Ministry of Machinery Industry (the predecessor of the Ministry of Electronics Industry).

The 13th Research Institute, based in Shijiazhuang, developed China's first integrated circuit, DTL (Diode Crystal Logic), in 1965, only seven years after the United States. And Shanghai Radio No. 5 Factory developed TTL (transistor logic) in 1966, which was only 3 years behind the West! It is extremely regrettable that at a time when China's semiconductor and electronic technology is approaching the international advanced level, a decade of political turmoil has brought this cutting-edge scientific research to a halt in China and has lagged behind the developed countries in the West since then.

Despite this, our core scientific research capabilities have survived and risen to the challenge. In 1979, Shanghai Component No. 5 Factory and Shanghai Radio No. 14 Factory jointly imitated (reverse engineered) the 8080 eight-bit microprocessor (No. 5G8080).

The 8080 is the second CPU processor launched by Intel Corporation in 1974, integrating 6,000 transistors and performing 290,000 operations per second. Since the first personal computer was created in 1975, the 8080 chip helped Intel dominate computer chips a few years later. Germany's Siemens copied the 8080 chip in October 1980 (Siemens SAB8080A-C), a year later than China. It can be said that by the end of the 70s of the 20th century, China's semiconductor development still maintained a relatively complete scientific research and independent development system, and there was no insurmountable gap with the world.

For example, Wuxi has a "742" belonging to the Ministry of Four Machines, which can be said to be China's "chip cradle", because it is the first wafer factory with large-scale production built at the beginning of China's reform and opening up, and the construction time was 1980, when the state invested 2800 million RMB. Factory 742 imported a full set of 3-inch semiconductor wafer fabs (5 micron technology) from Toshiba of Japan, and officially put into production in 1982, at that time the products were mainly for the development of color TVs. Because color TV was very popular in China at that time, the Chinese people who had just become rich, every household wanted to have a color TV, so our semiconductor products mainly met the matching of color TV. From 1984 to 1990, a total of 33 semiconductor wafer factories were introduced and built in various places. However, due to the limitations of the times and the inconsistency in the understanding of chips, most semiconductor wafer factories have not formed large-scale production and do not have commercial operation capabilities. Although fabs have blossomed across the country, repeated construction has made the industry cheap and lacks the incentive to develop in the direction of innovation and cutting-edge.

There is a strange circle that cannot be bypassed in the "core" industry (or the semiconductor industry), that is, the more it lags behind others, the more it is dominated, or it has a weakness that you can't get rid of, the production line and equipment you use to make chips can be bought, but it is almost impossible to buy the most advanced core equipment, and if you can't buy core equipment, you have to always slow down behind others, so the result of slowing down is: your nose will always be led by others. To be honest, the Western world wants developing China to follow them honestly.

Would the Chinese want to? You can bear with it for the time being, but you will never promise to be like this forever.

Finish reading....