During this period, competition in the mobile phone industry is rapidly taking shape.

The market is becoming increasingly fierce.

Flip phones have been manufactured, and slider phones have begun to appear, which leaves those mobile phone manufacturers with no time to distract themselves from the field of touch screens.

In addition, today's customers are more concerned about whether the mobile phone is durable, whether the battery life is long, and other "quality" issues, so no one will waste time and money to consider manufacturing mobile phones that the market does not like.

The idea put forward by Chen Weidong did not look good to Sony, but for the sake of his "huge capital", it was still happy to accompany him in his madness.

Because this can not only accumulate experience, but also speed up technological innovation.

No matter how you look at it, it's a win-win situation.

After leaving Sony, Chen Weidong immediately called Chen Jie and explained to him the preliminary preparations required.

Including some details of cooperation with Sony.

It is not an easy task to overcome technical barriers that have lasted for at least ten years.

Just a mobile phone operating system is not that difficult.

Although Infinity Computer Company has thousands of excellent programmers, they are good at application software development and are completely blind as to how to design a mobile operating system.

Finally, after research and discussion, the computer department decided to start with imitation.

Otherwise, starting from scratch and just exploring will take a lot of time.

Copycats are always the fastest way to catch up with the opponent’s technological pace.

They found a new mobile phone jointly developed with Symbian Company, and planned to first analyze the core of the Symbian system, then try to design a simple operating system, and finally improve it...

At this time, due to the relaxation of the relationship between Infinite Company and the Precision Research Institute, many researchers returned to the laboratory one after another.

They were so happy that they couldn't close their mouths together, and they all praised Chen Jie for being so generous.

Then, they dived into the laboratory and continued the research they had not completed before.

Logically speaking, "outsiders" like them would have to pay for using the company's instruments, but Chen Jie learned through Gong Zhao that the Institute of Precision Research was extremely poor, with only seven to eight million in annual funding.

This made him really embarrassed to ask for money.

Professor Kruger also held many discussions with Chen Jie and others in the past month and finally determined the research direction.

His primary goal now is to design a chip drawing, which is very difficult and requires the cooperation of many people.

A small chip embodies the wisdom of all mankind. In fact, even the United States cannot fully grasp all the links.

The area of ​​a mobile phone chip is basically only about 10 square millimeters, which is about the same size as the nail of your thumb.

And there is not only a CPU structure, but other structures such as GPU, NPU, ISP, DAC decoding chip, baseband, etc. are all included in it.

Designers need to arrange billions of transistors in this area the size of a fingernail and make them work accurately.

Precision is like using a pen to carve out an entire city on it.

From the drawing stage to the physical stage, a chip generally needs to go through two steps, namely chip design and chip manufacturing.

Building a chip is like building a building, and chip design is like designing architectural drawings for the building.

The United States has an absolute advantage in the field of chip design.

Their semiconductor industry started earliest, and they manufactured the first chip in the world.

Chips are products of the semiconductor industry, and semiconductors are the materials used to make chips.

This industry, popularly, is called the chip industry, and academically, it is called the semiconductor industry. In fact, it is equivalent to the difference between potatoes and potatoes.

Just designing the chip is not enough. He also needs to use a photolithography machine to engrave the chip.

The photolithography machine is equivalent to the "pen" used for engraving.

In the world, only three countries have the ability to manufacture photolithography machines, and among them, only island countries and the Netherlands can manufacture high-end photolithography machines.

Although the island country has a small land area, it has strong scientific and technological strength and industrial foundation.

In the 1980s, the island country's photolithography machines were the most advanced in the world.

At that time, Nikon and Canon were also able to produce lithography machines and once occupied more than 50% of the industry. Major customers including IBM, Intel, and Texas Instruments all rushed to buy their lithography machines.

However, due to a mistake by these two companies, the island country handed over the crown of the photolithography machine giant to ASML of the Netherlands.

ASML began developing EUV lithography machines around 2000 and decided to mass-produce them.

At that time, the island's lithography machine companies believed that the system was too complex and did not choose to follow up.

At that time, ASML was still a small company. Facing the dominance of the island country in the lithography machine market, they decided to overtake in a corner and try the "immersion lithography machine technology" proposed by TSMC and Lin Benjian.

This technology may sound very high-end to you, but it is actually a very simple technology. It was so simple that when Chen Weidong heard about it for the first time, he thought he had heard it wrong.

So he was deeply impressed by this incident.

Immersion lithography technology means that the space between the lithography lens and the silicon wafer to be engraved is filled with liquid, which can greatly improve the processing accuracy of the lithography machine!

Chen Weidong told Professor Kruger about this "technology".

In recent days, he has used the photolithography machine brought back from the Treehouse Research Institute in his experiments, with a photolithography accuracy of 190 nanometers, and successfully carved dense patterns of 105 nanometers!

This result made him ecstatic!

Almost lost his temper!

In a normal photolithography machine, there is no obstruction between the photolithography lens and the silicon wafer.

Of course, from another perspective, there is air between them.

The idea of ​​​​immersion is to replace the air in the middle with liquid.

Since the liquid has a refractive index, when ultraviolet rays pass through the liquid medium, the wavelength of its light source will be shortened, thus playing the role of fine engraving.

At first, they thought that the lithography machine was somewhat old, but it suddenly transformed into a 105-nanometer lithography machine, which far surpassed the existing lithography technology!

In fact, this immersion photolithography technology is not the first of ASML.

As early as the early 1980s, scientists used immersion technology to successfully improve photolithography effects.

However, with this technology, its liquid can easily contaminate optical lenses.

Therefore, the mainstream lithography technology research in this period only used it as a transitional means and did not pay enough attention.

Once the next generation of lithography technology matures, immersion lithography will be abandoned without hesitation.
Chapter completed!