1991 Starting from the core

Tick.

Tick.

Tick...

Su Yuanshan looked away from the long-eared iron alarm clock.

Stallone hangs at the head of the bed, and Vivian Chow is at the end of the bed. There is glass on the desk, and underneath there are photos of him from childhood to adulthood. Against the wall of the desk is a Yanwu dual-card cassette player, with a row of English tapes on it.

Farther away is the Laser-310 learning machine covered with red silk cloth. On the bookshelf are his textbooks from childhood to adulthood and several electronic books.

This is Su Yuanshan’s bedroom when he was in middle school.

February 25, 1991, the eleventh day of the first lunar month.

At this moment, Su Yuanshan has just entered the first year of high school.

If he follows the trajectory, he will finish high school in No. 7 Middle School, and because his father is an associate professor of electronic science and technology at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, he has had a strong interest in electronic circuits and programming since he was a child. As a child who grew up in the college, Without hesitation, he chose to take the exam at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.

Then one autumn he met his wife Ye Rudai on campus.

After graduating from his father, he applied to study at Columbia University to pursue a master's and doctoral degree in computer engineering. After graduation, he joined Intel and stayed for three years to witness the birth of P3 to P4. After that, he returned to China with his wife. Then he was invited by his senior brother to join National Core as a logic design engineer. His wife returned to the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China to teach.

After that, he would stay at Guoxin for eight years until he was exhausted and was invited to work as a simulation tool consultant for an EDA company until his senior brother invited him to join Guoxin.

Having been responsible for logic design, structural design, and even microcode compilation, Su Yuanshan has become the chief architect of HiSilicon.

However, it turns out that without the support of the high-end semiconductor industry, even if you can design the most advanced SOC, it will be nothing more than a mirror image.

…

Su Yuanshan closed his eyes hard and buried the past in his heart.

Now that he is reborn, the sentimentality of middle-aged people is no longer needed.

1991 was not the worst year for the domestic semiconductor industry, but it was not far from good either.

This year, while Intel was making final repairs to 80486, it began to hold back its ultimate move.

And because Intel canceled the X86 authorization to other "second suppliers" during the 386 era, this year AMD and Cyrix are using the clean room method to create reverse copycats that make Intel scold them.

Of course, even if other manufacturers conduct white-box testing and reproduction in clean rooms - similar to dissecting a CPU and then blindly guessing the microcode to finally implement functions that are compatible with the original product - as long as you are doing x86 architecture, There must be no way around Intel's various patents under this architecture.

The most notorious of these is the Crawford ‘338 Patent, which is a patent on memory management and cache. It is said that no one can circumvent it under X86.

Thanks to this, Intel wielded the big stick of patents and beat all the copycats to a complete defeat - not to mention that except Cyrix, the free-for-profit genius. It relied on the authorization of its old rival Texas Instruments to take advantage of Intel's loopholes.

By the way, the CPUs of the copycats are called XX386 and XX486.

Two years later, Intel CEO Andy Grove was so angry that if the new CPU was called 586, he would have to step over my dead body, and Pentium was born.

——Light, wait for light, wait for light.

In contrast, at this time, the country was full of waste - in the 1980s, dozens of semiconductor production lines were introduced into the country, but only a few were finally successfully put into production. In addition, some high-end products were imported into the country, which gave birth to the " The illusion that it is better to buy than to make.

You know, when the DJS-050 was originally copied from Intel's C8008, it was only five years behind.

The 908 project, which is still in the demonstration stage, will be officially approved next year, but has stalled due to various reasons.

Su Yuanshan remembers clearly that next year Cadence, one of the three EDA giants, will enter the country and begin to crush the domestic EDA software Panda ICCAD.

Memories are like fallen leaves filled with yellow sand. As the thoughts spread, they gradually become clearer, allowing Su Yuanshan to clarify the context.

His eyes gradually brightened.

Crush Panda CAD?

If I, who have the next thirty years of experience in using EDA software and know all the difficulties and pain points in EDA use, as well as various excellent algorithms of later generations, can help others to tinker with an EDA, what should it be?

Dimensionality reduction attack?

…

Su Yuanshan's thoughts were interrupted by his mother's call.

"Hill."

"Hey, Mom." Su Yuanshan wiped his face and responded with a smile.

"Hurry and pack up and go downstairs. Your uncle is coming soon. He said he brought you a gift."

"Brother-in-law?" This title that had disappeared in his mind for a long time suddenly awakened the unpleasantness in Su Yuanshan's memory, and he couldn't help but said in a deep voice: "What is he here for?"

Su Yuanshan's uncle is Zhang Ke, who was considered a great talent in the family in the 1980s and 1990s - he and a group of people worked as a gangster, traveling from south to north, and then to the far north, earning millions in a few years . For this reason, Zhang Xiuyun often complained to her husband Su Xinghe, complaining that as a professor, her husband made more money than a speculator.

To be fair, my brother-in-law is not the kind of old hat who sticks his tail up when he makes money. He has always respected his highly intellectual brother-in-law, and once gave an Inspur 486 to Su Yuanshan's father.

But everything changed after Zhang Ke got acquainted with the talented man who made 100 million by reselling second-hand airplanes.

Zhang Ke, who was still in awe of knowledge before, became arrogant and entered the futures market under the guidance of that talented person. As a result, he lost all his pants.

Later, my brother-in-law found Su Yuanshan's mother. Zhang Xiuyun, a "brother-supporting devil" in later generations, believed his brother's lie that he would repay the capital in a month at most. He gave all the family savings to his brother and misappropriated 100,000 public funds.

The result can be imagined...

Associate Professor Su Xinghe was so anxious that he almost died overnight and asked people everywhere to borrow money to fill the hole.

Although this matter was not discovered in the end, there was no peace in the family from then on - this was one of the reasons why Su Yuanshan applied to study abroad in the first place.

After that, my uncle fell into despair and became a scoundrel who cheated and lied everywhere.

Su Yuanshan's tone surprised Zhang Xiuyun. Zhang Ke has always been very kind to Su Yuanshan, and his son has always liked his uncle. Did the boy take the wrong medicine today?

Just when Zhang Xiuyun was about to curse, Su Yuanshan's tone became surprised.

"Is it my uncle? I'll go down and pick him up!"

Su Yuanshan put on his coat and quickly opened the door.

Before going out, he glanced at his mother.

My mother, who has just turned forty this year, has black hair all over her head, is lazily leaning on the sofa watching TV.

"Mom, you are so young."

"Um?"

Ignoring his mother's doubts, Su Yuanshan ran down the stairs with a smile.

——At this time, my brother-in-law has not turned into the scoundrel that everyone hates, but he is still the same brother-in-law who treats me very well.

When we came downstairs, our uncle, who was in his early thirties, was as high-spirited as he remembered. There were two large cardboard boxes at his feet.

(New book sets sail, please vote for recommendation~)

In addition, because this book is an industry-oriented text, there will be a lot of vocabulary and terms related to programming, semiconductors and even the machinery industry in the book. The author tries his best to explain them. At the same time, detailed explanations will be given in this chapter, but some of the vocabulary involved are too technical and there is really no way to explain it clearly... and at the same time, these words cannot be avoided... so please include them. If you have any questions, you can talk about this chapter or leave a message in the book review area.