Chapter 233: Enter the village quietly, don’t let anyone shoot you

Author: quiet thoughts

Chapter 233: Enter the village quietly, don’t let anyone shoot you

"Your company's SIC8081 is even better than Intel8086 in terms of performance. I have to say, Shirakawa-san, you have once again surprised me."

Matsuka Moichi looked at the drawing instructions in his hand with an interested expression.

In addition to the DRAM field, will Neon's chips also catch up with the United States in the processor field?

This is exciting news, at least according to Matsuka Moriyoshi.

Isn’t the reason why Japan concentrated its national efforts to invest in the memory chip industry in the past few years to reduce its dependence on the United States?

From raw materials to equipment to technology, we will comprehensively catch up or even surpass.

Now that DRAM is in sight of victory, there are unexpected breakthroughs in processor application fields.

Although the processor-level chip market is not large at the moment, to some extent it can be regarded as making up for some shortcomings.

This is indeed a happy thing for Matsuka Moriyi, who has a strong sense of collective honor.

"Easier said than done. Only after doing it did I realize that chip research and development is far more complicated than I imagined."

The reason why SIC's first chip was able to complete the drawing design so quickly was because Shirakawa Kaede spent a lot of effort.

At Eastern Polytechnic University, there are fifty or sixty people in total, including professors and doctoral-level trainees.

These are highly educated people, not ordinary employees.

And it is no exaggeration to say that Tokyo Institute of Technology is definitely the top technical university in Japan.

With so much investment in manpower and material resources, the front-end design of the chip has finally been advanced.

Later, with the addition of Masatoshi Shima, who has rich product experience, SIC's chip development officially entered the fast lane.

Otherwise, Shirakawa Feng optimistically estimates that the research and development of the first chip can be completed next year, which will be considered a good efficiency.

"What Shirakawa-san said is that the research and development of integrated circuits is indeed incredibly expensive.

It is truly rare for your company to achieve this level of success.”

Moritsu Matsuka felt the same way about Shirakawa Kaede.

This reminded him of those passionate days when everyone gathered together and worked hard in one direction.

The sense of honor of achieving success in the end is definitely not comparable to the success of a product.

I have to say that in the chip field in the 1970s, the courage to concentrate on big things was really impressive.

"Don't worry Shirakawa-san, if there are no problems in the technical drawing review, Fujitsu can accept it as the OEM for SIC.

But IMHO, the current market size of processor chips is relatively lacking.

Especially for 16-bit processors, due to cost reasons, the price is too high, and the market response may not be that optimistic."

As an industry insider, Matsuka Moriyoshi naturally knows the general market conditions of processor chips at this time.

If Shirakawa Kaede bets on 16-bit processor chips, then SIC is likely to end up with huge losses.

After all, it’s one thing if something is good, but it’s another thing if it can be sold.

Moreover, chip processing is not cheap, especially the masking fee for the first tape-out, which is astonishingly high.

Faced with Matsuka Moriyi's kind reminder, Shirakawa Kaede did not show any disappointment.

"Matsuka-san, this time SIC8081 is only tape-out and not mass production." This question was answered by Masatoshi Shima.

"What?!" Matsuka Moriichi thought he heard wrongly.

This...all the money is used to burn and play?

You must know that the cost of each chip tape-out is as high as millions or even millions of dollars.

This conversion would cost at least two to three billion yen.

For smaller companies, a single tapout failure may even lead to bankruptcy.

Does Shirakawa-san really know what he is doing? Matatsuka Moichiro felt that he had overestimated him before.

"Matsuka-san, this time SIC8081 only performs functional verification after the design is completed.

In the future, we will make a simplified design based on the existing architecture.

Then it launched its logic-optimized version. This version of the processor is between 8-bit and 16-bit.

This is the main model we are going to bring to the market this year.”

In fact, Masato Shima is already doing preliminary planning for this part of the work, and he is quite confident in his design.

After hearing Shima Masatoshi's explanation, Matsuka Moriyoshi not only did not feel relieved, but was even more surprised.

Spending more than 200 million yen just for tape-out verification is really inhumane.

But if this is the basic logic version, this is not impossible.

It's just too expensive, because every time a version is developed, it will need to be tape-out. How much money will it cost?

While Moriyoshi Matatsuka lamented SIC's wealth, he was also surprised by its ambition.

If you dare to do this, you must have confidence in your own chips and confidence in the future market, so you would make such a choice.

"I understand what you mean, and Fujitsu will fully cooperate with you."

Anyway, Matsuka Moriichi has nothing to say about giving money.

Moreover, Arishima Masatoshi will not give up halfway. In addition, he himself also wants to see how the SIC chip performs.

In addition to his hope that Neon will make further progress in the local chip field, don't forget that Fujitsu is also one of the companies that produces consumer electronics products.

If successful, there may be possibilities for cooperation in the future.

"I'll leave it to Matsuka-san. The specific release date will be decided by Shima-san later."

Shirakawa Kaede came here today to pay homage to Shantou. After having a cooperation experience, Masatoshi Shima will be responsible for the rest.

"Also, I would like to remind Shirakawa-san that after the tape-out begins, it is best to determine the production volume of this type of chip as soon as possible.

There is a direct relationship between the cost of each chip and the shipment volume, and I believe Shima-san also understands the specific differences."

Following Matsuka Moriichi's reminder, Shima Masato also nodded. This was exactly what he had reminded Shirakawa Kaede before.

Judging from the current progress, perhaps the early promotion can already begin.

If the design cost of chip research and development is ignored, the hardware cost after it is officially put into production is not a small number.

The hardware cost of the chip roughly includes wafer cost, mask cost, test cost and packaging cost.

Among them, the testing cost is negligible, and the packaging cost roughly accounts for about 5%-20% of the hardware cost.

The so-called packaging is to stack the substrate, core, and heat sink together to finally form the CPU we see in our daily life.

In today's era, because the process is not as complicated as that of later generations, packaging costs are almost fixed, and the proportion is not too exaggerated.

Among the hardware costs of the chip, the real big ones are actually the first two, the wafer cost and the mask cost.

There is a special proportional relationship between the two and chip production.

When the chip output is small, the mask cost will be the absolute majority of the chip hardware cost.

For example, with a mask cost of US$1 million, the final output is only 10,000 pieces.

Then the mask cost allocated to each chip head is as high as $100.

This is just the cost of the mask. If other costs are included, the final chip cost will be a jaw-dropping figure.

When the chip production reaches hundreds of millions, the mask cost will be diluted to US$0.01, which is basically ignored.

At that time, wafers will account for the majority of hardware costs. After all, the utilization rate of wafers is not 100%.

The area of ​​a wafer is fixed, and due to yield reasons, the number of chips that can ultimately be produced is also fixed.

Sometimes the cost of a wafer is as high as thousands of dollars. When averaged out, the cost of a chip will be a few dollars.

For some special chips, the wafer cost can even reach tens of dollars.

Of course, this is related to the complexity of the chip processing process. The simpler the process, the higher the yield, and the lower the chip cost will naturally be.

The stakes involved in this were introduced to Shirakawa Kaede in detail by Masatoshi Shima.

So generally speaking, Shirakawa Kaede understood why these two people reminded themselves of the issue of determining the shipment volume of chips.

However, regarding subsequent promotion, we still need to wait for the chip to be taped out to see how it actually performs before we can make specific plans.

"Thanks to Mazuka-san for reminding me, I will consider this issue as soon as possible." The OEM matter has begun to take shape, and Bai Chuanfeng is also preparing to say goodbye and leave.

"By the way, people from Intel are visiting Fujitsu today.

They are engaged in both DRAM business and microprocessor chip business.

Shirakawa-san, do you need them to meet? Maybe we are peers and can have good communication in the processor field."

Just when Shirakawa Kaede and others were about to leave, Matatsuka Moriyoshi told a surprising news.
To be continued...