parentshiftbook Chapter 477 Liang Mengsong's Choice
Chapter 477 Liang Mengsong's Choice
The success of the Starcore 1st generation was like a shot in the arm, putting the entire Spark Mobile Business Unit in a state of high excitement. The day after Ling Yun returned from Europe, Li Mo blocked his office door with a stack of blueprints.
"Brother Yun, the initial draft of the StarCore 2 architecture is out." Li Mo spread the blueprints out on the table, covering half of it. "0.13-micron process, clock speed increased to 600 MHz, integrated 3D graphics accelerator—supporting OpenGL ES 1.0 standard. Most importantly, this." He pointed to a module in the lower right corner of the chip block diagram, "Baseband interface. This is reserved for Noah's Ark. Once the WCDMA baseband comes out on Liang's side, the two chips can communicate directly via the internal bus, without needing an external one."
Ling Yun bent down and examined it for a long time. The densely packed modules and connections on the diagram resembled an intricately woven spider web of circuitry. He pointed to the GPU module, "How many polygons can the 3D accelerator run?"
"Three million triangles per second. That's more than an order of magnitude stronger than the Star Core Generation 1 2D accelerator."
"What about power consumption?"
"Full load is estimated at 1.2 watts, and standby at 50 milliwatts. We are still optimizing, with the goal of reducing standby to below 30 milliwatts." Li Mo turned to another page, which was a pie chart of power consumption distribution, with the CPU and GPU occupying the largest two sections. "I got the power consumption parameters of Samsung's latest AMOLED screen for reference. If the screen power consumption can be reduced accordingly, the overall battery life of StarPhone 2 can be improved by at least 30% compared to the first generation."
Ling Yun straightened up. Outside the window, the tower crane was hoisting new steel beams, the welding flashes intermittently. "Let's proceed with this plan. Here's a hard target—tape-out in the third quarter of 2006, mass production in the first quarter of 2007. The StarPhone 2 will use this chip."
"Okay." Li Mo rolled up the blueprint and secured it with a rubber band.
Just then, the landline on Ling Yun's desk rang. He answered it, and it was Liang Mengsong's voice.
"Mr. Ling, if it's convenient for you, there's something I'd like to tell you."
"you say."
"TSMC poached another one of our employees. This time it's the deputy director of process integration at their Singapore plant, who worked at Spark for four years." Liang Mengsong's voice was calm, but Ling Yun could sense the underlying tension in his calm. "They offered five times the annual salary. I couldn't keep him."
Ling Yun held the receiver and remained silent for two seconds. "Who else is wavering?"
"At least four or five core engineers were contacted. TSMC representatives booked rooms in hotels near the Singapore Science Park to meet with them one by one. Frankly, the salaries they offered were beyond my means."
I'm flying to Singapore tomorrow.
"President Ling—"
"Arrive tomorrow afternoon. Gather all the core engineers in the conference room."
When the plane landed at Changi Airport, Singapore was experiencing a tropical downpour. The windshield wipers were whirring wildly against the windshield, and the palm trees along the roadside were bent over by the wind. Liang Mengsong picked him up at the airport, and the two got into the car, barely speaking for the rest of the journey.
The rain had stopped when they arrived at the wafer fab. Water droplets still clung to the palm leaves in the factory area. More than twenty people were already seated in the conference room, some wearing cleanroom suits and clutching their recently removed head coverings. As Ling Yun walked in, several young engineers instinctively stood up.
"Please sit down." Ling Yun stopped at the front of the conference table. He looked at the group of people in front of him—some had their hair flattened by cleanroom caps, and some had bloodshot eyes, clearly having just come from a night shift. At the front sat a middle-aged man in his forties, whose name tag read "Deputy Director of Process Integration Department." Ling Yun glanced at Liang Mengsong, who shook his head slightly—not this one. This man hadn't left.
"I'm here today because someone wants to poach you," Ling Yun said bluntly. "TSMC offered you three to five times the salary. It's impossible for anyone not to be tempted."
The meeting room was so quiet that you could hear the hissing of the air conditioner vents.
"TSMC can offer you higher salaries." Ling Yun took a step forward. "But they can't give you one thing—a sense of participation in history. What you're doing in Singapore now isn't working for someone else. You're building a world-class chip manufacturing company from scratch, a company owned by the Chinese themselves."
He stopped, looking at the engineer whose hair was flattened, and then at the young man sitting next to him whose hands still had traces of developer.
"Ten years from now, when your children ask you, 'Mom and Dad, where were you during that chip breakthrough battle?' I hope you can say—'I was on the front lines.'"
The young engineer lowered his head and rubbed his eyes with his fingers.
"Passion alone isn't enough," Ling Yun continued. "President Liang, the salaries of core employees will be increased by fifty percent starting today. The option pool will also be expanded to cover all engineers involved in the 0.13-micron project. In addition—" He took a stack of documents from Liang Mengsong and placed them on the table, "This is the equity incentive plan that I had the legal department revise. After five years of service at Xinghuo, the options can be exercised. After ten years, the equity can be directly converted into common stock."
A collective gasp rippled through the conference room. This type of incentive was virtually unprecedented in mainland Chinese tech companies at the time.
Ling Yun pushed the proposal forward a bit. "TSMC is offering three times the pay, I'll offer 1.5 times, plus stock options. Within three years, we'll ensure our core engineers earn more than their counterparts at TSMC. Within five years, we'll make your equity worth an apartment in Singapore. This isn't just empty promises—you're the ones who achieved the yield rate of StarCore 1, and you're the ones who manufactured the StarPhone chip. You know in your hearts whether Spark can deliver on its promises."
When the meeting ended, Ling Yun stood at the door and shook hands with each engineer who left. The young engineer's palms were sweaty as he shook hands with him, and he said, "Mr. Ling, I'm not leaving."
Why?
"Because my dad worked his whole life in a state-owned electronics factory. The day the factory closed down, he took off his employee badge and put it on the table, saying that his biggest regret in life was not being able to make chips made by Chinese people themselves." He let go of his hand and scratched his head. "I didn't tell him what I did at Spark. I just wanted to wait until the day our chips were in Samsung and Apple phones, and then I would take them back to show him."
Ling Yun patted him on the shoulder.
After everyone had left, Liang Mengsong leaned against the conference table, took off his glasses, and slowly wiped them with a lint-free cloth. "President Ling, you're even more eloquent than TSMC's HR director."
"It's not that I can say, it's that they actually wanted to stay." Ling Yun sat down and finished the remaining half bottle of mineral water. "Those who really wanted to leave wouldn't have come to this meeting."
"That's true." Liang Mengsong put on his glasses. "The 0.13-micron copper interconnect process successfully completed trial production last week, with a current yield of 88%. The target for next month is 92%. Things are stable in Singapore—but TSMC won't just poach talent. Their current strategy is to suppress us from all sides. What's our next step?"
What are your thoughts?
Liang Mengsong pulled a document from his briefcase; the cover read "Starlight II." "Shenzhen will build another 12-inch wafer fab, starting at 0.13 micrometers, directly targeting TSMC's technology level in 2000. Give me three years, and I can narrow the gap to within one generation."
Ling Yun flipped through the documents. "Money isn't the issue. Do we have enough people?"
"We'll move one-third of the core team from Singapore, and recruit the rest from Shenzhen. I also want to poach a group of engineers with 12-inch fab experience from Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea." Liang Mengsong paused, "But you know, poaching people is harder than poaching equipment. TSMC's HR department is no pushover."
"You just said TSMC doesn't just poach people—what else have they done?"
"The lithography machine we ordered last week got stuck. ASML in the Netherlands sent a letter saying that the export license approval was blocked by the US Department of Commerce. This equipment was originally intended for our new factory in Shenzhen." Liang Mengsong's tone was still calm, but his hands had already crumpled the lint-free cloth into a ball. "So whether Starlight II can start on schedule doesn't depend on money or manpower. It depends on how quickly we can find a replacement device."
Ling Yun didn't reply immediately. It started raining again outside the window, the raindrops pattering on the palm leaves.
"I'll figure out the equipment issue. You just proceed with the plan."
That evening, while waiting for her flight at Singapore Airport, Ling Yun made a phone call to Ni Guangnan.
"Professor Ni, ASML's export license has been blocked by the US. How's the progress of that light source project from the Institute of Optics and Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, which you mentioned last time?"
There was a moment of silence on the other end of the phone. "It's difficult. We've run the deep ultraviolet laser light source successfully a few times in the lab, but there's still a long way to go before it's commercialized. Lingyun, let me tell you the truth—lithography machines aren't something you can just throw money at. They take time."
"How long will it take?"
"The light source will take at least three more years. The high-precision objective lens assembly will take even longer; there's practically no domestic experience in that area."
Ling Yun leaned back in the waiting area, watching the tail fins of the planes on the tarmac flash red in the rain outside the window. "Let's buy secondhand ones first. Taiwan, Japan, South Korea—find factories that are phasing out their old production lines, dismantle their used equipment, and refurbish and debug it ourselves. Once domestically produced equipment catches up, we'll replace it."
"Second-hand equipment isn't always available. Under the Wassenaar Arrangement, many things are on the control list."
"Then let's go through unregulated channels. Liang Mengsong knows a few middlemen who deal in used semiconductor equipment; let them scout ahead first." Ling Yun stood up; the announcement was urging boarding. "Old Ni, back when we were in Jinan talking about building a lithography machine, you told me it might take twenty years. It's only been a few years now? Don't rush—but don't stop."
After hanging up the phone, Ling Yun picked up his suitcase and headed towards the boarding gate. Behind him, through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the lights of Singapore's rainy night shimmered like gold in the puddles. He recalled 1997 in Silicon Valley, when his attempt to acquire Netscape failed, and in a fit of anger, he decided to develop his own operating system. The path of self-reliance is never smooth—every step is fraught with difficulties. But footprints are left in the mud; once firmly planted, those behind can follow.