Starting From the Chip in 1991

Chapter 27 Don't Follow Wanyan's Path

With the arrival of the newly recruited employees, the available space on the ninth floor shrank dramatically. Now, there were over 130 workstations plus ten private offices.

These offices were assigned respectively to Li Mingliu, Tian Yaoming, Xi Xiaoding, Su Yuanshan, Qin Weimin, Su Xinghe, Sun Xihui for logistics, and the finance office, where Yang Yiwen temporarily worked because it was relatively less busy. The remaining two offices were used to house the workstations.

Since Su Xinghe, the boss, was often absent, his large office was occasionally repurposed as a conference room.

As for staff allocation, among Yuanxin's four teams, Xi Xiaoding's EDA team, which included after-sales service, was the largest with over sixty members. Tian Yaoming's communications team came second with nearly thirty people, and the remaining twenty or so were split between Li Mingliu and Qin Weimin.

Among them, Tian Yaoming's and Qin Weimin's teams theoretically wouldn't produce results in the short term—they were still in purely theoretical research phases. Even Li Mingliu didn't quite understand why Su Yuanshan insisted on pushing for a video decoding chip—after all, MPEG hadn't even been officially adopted as an international standard yet. Even if they developed it, there might be no products to use it with.

In many people's eyes, Yuanxin was relying solely on one EDA product to support three teams that had no foreseeable return.

But in Su Yuanshan's mind, the current structure of the company was still far from enough. If they truly wanted to achieve something significant in the semiconductor industry, the company would eventually need to grow by a hundred times. As long as salaries were low and they could afford it, better to nurture talent now—if they produced patents, great; if not, even new ideas would be better than doing nothing.

After holding a brief meeting with the company, Su Yuanshan returned to his office to discuss the architecture layout of the decoding chip with Li Mingliu.

According to Su Yuanshan's vision, the video decoding chip needed to be highly integrated, leaving no openings for competitors. But there was a problem—Huajing couldn't handle it.

Huajing's fab still only had five-inch 2-micron lines, and their packaging was still plastic. This was awkward—not that plastic was inherently bad, since CMOS chips had low voltage requirements and low heat generation, making them well-suited for plastic packaging, like the pagers which had no issues.

But VCDs were different. Video decoding demanded far more computational power than pagers, and the presence of a CD drive meant VCDs naturally generated more heat. Plastic packaging could easily cause overheating problems.

Currently, many companies could produce sub-2-micron chips—TI, Intel, AMD, UMC, TSMC, and many Japanese companies.

However, turning to those fabs would cost close to a million dollars per chip run—and immediate market returns were uncertain.

VCDs were a consumer product, unlike phones or pagers, which had inherent viral marketing effects. Owning a VCD might only impress a few neighbors. But owning a phone or pager meant everyone in your circle would know.

Wanyan (万燕) failed partly because they hadn't registered complete device patents and had spent too much money just promoting the concept of VCDs, only to run out of funding and content later, becoming stepping stones for later entrants who crushed them.

One famous VCD company CEO even shamelessly said: "I never pioneer new markets."

As shameful as it sounded, there was some truth to it—especially when funding was tight.

"Maybe we should still stick with 2-micron processes. We could make the chip bigger and add a heatsink?" Li Mingliu suggested.

Su Yuanshan tapped his chin with a pen, staring at the project sheet, frowning deeply. "Theoretically doable, but the cost would be too high. No competitiveness."

Li Mingliu hesitated. "But... no one else is doing this right now, right?"

"Can't be sure," Su Yuanshan shook his head. "Let's stick to the original plan. We can't abandon advanced design just to save a little now."

"What about fabrication?" Li Mingliu asked.

"We'll skip Huajing. We'll go to TI, NEC, or UMC—anyway, since Yuanxin EDA is aiming for the international market, we'll need contacts with these giants eventually. Better to approach them with actual business than just try to sell software."

Su Yuanshan grabbed a pen and quickly signed the project sheet. "Two months—can you do it? If you can, I'll go help Senior Brother Weimin."

Li Mingliu lowered his head in thought. He knew Su Yuanshan was a freak—not only a boss-level figure in programming but also capable of suppressing even the strongest chip designer, Qin Weimin. A true genius.

If Su Yuanshan helped, they could probably save half a month at least.

"No problem!" Li Mingliu looked up, signed, and smiled. "We can't let people think Yuanxin collapses without you."

Su Yuanshan didn't know how to respond, so he just laughed and shook his head.

After Li Mingliu straightened his back and left, Su Yuanshan grabbed his file folder and headed up to the tenth floor.

**

A month ago, renovations on the tenth floor had begun. At first, Uncle Zhang supervised; after he left for Jiangyin, Sun Xihui from logistics took over.

Sun Xihui, thirty years old, looked like she was in her twenties wearing her neat black-and-white outfit—maybe even better, with a touch of elegance. Originally a logistics manager at a rural primary school, she had lost her job after a school merger. Her options were to transfer to a remote rural school or study for a teacher's certificate. While training in the provincial capital, she stumbled across Yuanxin's hiring notice and was stunned by the salary. Thanks to her prior logistics experience, she was quickly hired by Zhang Ke to manage Yuanxin's logistics.

At this moment, the cleaning was nearly finished. Sun Xihui carefully covered the borrowed slide projector from UESTC with silk cloth to keep dust off.

"Sun Jie."

"Little President Su."

"Tomorrow, about sixty guests will be here. We're responsible for the food, so please arrange with Boss Cai from the restaurant to avoid letting our visitors go hungry."

"No problem," Sun Xihui smiled sweetly. "Little President Su, are you giving the lecture tomorrow?"

"No, just testing the equipment."

Seeing that, Sun Xihui pulled the cloth off the projector and quickly sprinkled water around to settle the dust, instructing the cleaners to be careful.

When the cleaning was done and the trash was taken out, she went to pull the curtains around the room. Seeing this, Su Yuanshan hurried to help—after all, the tenth floor was almost 1,500 square meters. Running around it alone would be exhausting.

Once the surroundings darkened, Su Yuanshan returned to the front hall and turned on the slide projector.

Since they lacked enough computers and had no modern projectors, they had to use slides and a projector to conduct training.

When Sun Xihui came back, slightly out of breath, she said, "Um... Little President Su."

"What is it?" Su Yuanshan replied casually, adjusting the focus.

"My cousin runs a computer training center in the city. Although he hired some teachers, I think no one can match the expertise of our company's engineers. So... would it be possible to ask our engineers to teach part-time classes? Of course, they'll pay."

Seeing Su Yuanshan turn around, she grew nervous. "Just weekends or evenings... would that be okay?"

"Of course," Su Yuanshan chuckled. "You don't need to ask me. It's their free time."

Sun Xihui sighed in relief. "I just didn't want to cause trouble."

"No worries. By the way, which training center is it?"

"By the First Ring Road, near Taiping Street. It's called Dongfang Computer Training Center."

"Oh, I've seen it," Su Yuanshan said, recalling the big signboard he often passed by. "We're a private company. After-hours time belongs to employees. Even state-owned enterprises can't control that."

"Thank you, Little President Su. You're welcome to visit and give guidance."

"I'll drop by if I get the chance," Su Yuanshan said casually, shutting off the projector after adjusting the focus.

Tomorrow, the trainees would include engineers from Huajing, Beiling, and Yandong Microelectronics, along with some instructors from UESTC and the provincial university.

Given the impressive names of the institutions attending, it was decided that Xi Xiaoding would deliver the opening lecture—after all, he had the highest academic credentials at Yuanxin.

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