Global Monopoly of Technology

Luo Sheng did a full body spa after breakfast, and started work around 10 am, but the location was in the Science and Technology Complex Building.

Today is the weekend. For the rest day, Luo Sheng will no longer deal with the company's affairs at this time, but will do his own private research and fiddle with his own black technology.

Unless it is a company with a special emergency.

"Master (o?▽?)o, the latest batch of hardware devices from Dawning Technology will be delivered tomorrow."

Just as Luo Sheng sat down in his private office, Xiaona's voice entered his ears.

Luo Sheng nodded and said casually, "Put it in the warehouse first."

Xiaona: "Master wants to upgrade Xiaona again?"

Luo Sheng was sitting at the desk, leaning back against the chair, holding the back of his head with his hands and closing his eyes, thinking, "Yes."

Xiaona: "(?????) The owner is great, I'm looking forward to it, oh oh oh~~"

The upgrade of supercomputers is of course very dependent on the advancement of semiconductor technology, but the more critical thing is the system architecture and algorithms. Algorithms will always be the soul and core of a computer or artificial intelligence.

To achieve the same instruction, the A algorithm needs 100 steps to implement, but the B algorithm only needs 10 steps to implement.

Luo Sheng is going to forcibly upgrade his personal supercomputing this time. The hardware part will definitely not be possible in a short period of time. This is too dependent on the technological development of the semiconductor industry. Now the semiconductor industry represented by Intel has achieved nano-processes. craftsmanship level.

Throughout the semiconductor chip industry, the toothpaste factory is the first chip manufacturer in the industry to launch 32nm process processors, and the mainstream process is still 45nm. As for the 7nm and 5nm process processors in this era, it is simply science fiction.

And the current chip technology in China is hard to say, let alone.

Obviously, the hardware upgrade is not to be thought about for a while, and the performance of private supercomputing can only be improved as much as possible on the basis of the existing hardware from the two paths of system architecture and algorithm.

For outsiders, this is very difficult, super difficult, but for Luo Sheng, developing a new algorithm is a very simple matter, even one person can do it, and now Xiaona can also help him to further improve the development efficiency.

After the upgrade is completed this time, the performance of the private supercomputing in the science and technology complex building will be improved by about ten times, from a trillion trillion operations to a petaflop.

It's called black technology.

At present, Luo Sheng's personal supercomputer "Nuff", named after Xiaona's official name, has a performance of 230 trillion operations per second.

In other words, Luo Sheng will achieve a computing speed of at least 2,000 trillion operations per second after this upgrade. It is estimated that it will take about a month and a half to complete the upgrade plan. Some hardware needs to be replaced. This time The total budget for the major upgrade is about 120 million yuan.

At that time, it will surpass the current US Department of Energy's "Puma" located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

In the 2009 Top 500 Supercomputing Rankings, the "Puma" currently tops the list with 1,800 trillion operations per second, and is a civilian computer mainly used to simulate climate change, energy generation, and other Basic science research, etc.

Of course, Luo Sheng's personal supercomputer can also handle these tasks without pressure, but the fundamental purpose is to upgrade and optimize Xiaona.

This is the first priority, and Xiaona's upgrade and optimization will bring about an improvement in the overall benefit.

of unparalleled significance.

Upgrading and optimizing Xiaona is only a part of Luo Sheng's personal work. It takes more than a month to complete this round of upgrades, and he can't spend all his time on this, otherwise he can get it done in half a month. .

Luo Sheng has not officially resigned as CEO of the two companies. He has to participate in some major meetings, but most of his time has been spent on technology research and development.

Since entering 2009, Luo Sheng's work focus has basically been on development.

Since May, he has been separated from the cloud computing development team of Bluestar Technology. He has left the BlueStack open source cloud platform and basically handed it over to the following technical team and Lu Qi to operate this business sector.

Luo Sheng focused on the research and development of the third-generation Azure mobile phone on the Côte d’Azur, and this year’s Côte d’Azur will release the latest generation of smartphones.

...

Lens Semiconductor, Mobile Processor Division.

“The 45nm process introduced a high-K insulator/metal gate configuration, a milestone achievement that Intel developed. Both technologies are really designed to solve the same problem: the very small size Next, how to ensure the effective operation of the gate."

The speaker is Xu Zhijun. He is currently the CEO of Lens Semiconductor, but he does not have much say in the mobile processor division. Here, Luo Sheng has the final say, and it is also a relatively privileged career of Lens Semiconductor. It has an independent research and development building, which was agreed when the two parties jointly established the company.

However, both sides have broken through the barriers to talent and patents, which is critical.

Luo Sheng was also present at this meeting, and several scientists, research scholars, including some mathematicians, etc., all gathered in this conference room to discuss.

The focus of the discussion now is the processor of the third-generation Azure mobile phone. The chip processor of the new product adopts the 45nm process technology, which has been confirmed, and many technologies have been completed.

A senior research expert looked around and said: "Our R\u0026D department thought of using metal as the gate, because metal has an effect called image charge, which can neutralize the dipole pair channel in the insulating layer of the high-K material. And the influence of Fermi level. In this way, it is the best of both worlds, but what these metals are, no one knows except the few Western high-tech companies that master this technology, and this is their trade secret. ."

The insulating layer is the most critical one among all the components of the transistor, and its function is to isolate the gate and the channel. Because the gate switching channel is carried out by an electric field, and the generation of the electric field is realized by adding a certain voltage to the gate.

Ohm's law tells us that when there is voltage, there is current.

If current flows from the gate into the channel, what's the point of switching?

It's already leaked.

Another research scholar who participated in the conference said: "Silica is good, but it also has problems when the size is reduced to a certain limit. During this process, the electric field strength is constant, so from the energy band point of view, because The fluctuation of electrons, if the insulating layer is very narrow, there is a certain chance that the electrons will have a tunneling effect and cross the energy band barrier of the insulating layer, resulting in leakage current."

Having said that, the scholar gestured: "It can be imagined as passing through a wall higher than oneself. The magnitude of this current is negatively correlated with the thickness of the insulating layer and the 'barrier height' of the insulating layer. Small, the lower the potential barrier, the greater the leakage current, the more unfavorable for the transistor. On the other hand, the switching performance and operating current of the transistor all require a large insulating layer capacitance.”

"It can be seen that there have been a lot of contradictions in the design goals, whether the thickness of the insulating layer should continue to shrink. In fact, before this node, the silicon dioxide has been reduced to a thickness of less than two nanometers, which is ten With a thickness of a few atomic layers, the problem of leakage current has replaced the problem of performance as the enemy number one."

Having said that, all the scholars in the conference room fell silent.

The people sitting here are the smartest people, and if there is a problem, of course they start to think of a solution.

Humans are very greedy, neither willing to give up the performance enhancement of large capacitors, nor to take the risk of leakage.

The current situation is that a material is required with a high dielectric constant and a high energy band barrier, so that the capacitance can continue to be increased without shrinking the thickness.

In other words, it is a material that protects leakage current and improves switching performance.

In academia, in recent years, various new designs have been proposed, such as tunneling transistors, negative capacitance effect transistors, carbon nanotubes, and so on.

But in fact, all these designs are basically in four directions, material, mechanism, process and structure.

At this time, Xu Zhijun glanced at Luo Sheng, then looked around and said, "What about graphene transistors? The idea of ​​graphene as a channel is the second item, which is transportation, because the electron mobility of graphene is much higher than that of silicon."

As soon as these words came out, a scholar shook his head and said: "This magical material is indeed very imaginative, but the problem is that there is no progress in graphene transistors, most of which are in the conceptual and theoretical stages, and graphene has a flaw. It just can't saturate the current, but I noticed that some people in the Western academic circles said that in the future, it may be possible to control the opening and closing of the energy band gap of graphene, not just zero band gap. Anyway, graphene is a very promising future. material, but it's too early to talk about that."

Xu Zhijun immediately looked at Luo Sheng and asked, "Mr. Luo, what do you think?"

At this time, Luo Sheng was looking at the data information and a theoretical model on the big screen of the conference, and everyone also turned their attention to him. The latter stared at the data and function model on the screen and said:

"Listening to your discussions, I have been thinking about a question. Since electrons are moving in the channel, why do I have to leave such a large depletion layer under the channel? Of course, I know the reason, because the physical model This area is needed to balance the charge. But in short-channel devices, there is no need to put the depletion layer and the channel together and wait for the leakage current to flow in vain.”

A group of scholars looked at each other, they had never thought about this question.

Luo Sheng snapped his fingers, motioned to a scholar, then stared at the data model on the big screen of the conference and said:

"Modify it as I said, take this part of the silicon directly to me and replace it with an insulating layer, and the remaining silicon is under the insulating layer, so that the channel is separated from the depletion layer, because the electrons come from the poles, But there is an insulating layer between the poles and the depletion layer, so that there is no leakage other than the channel."

Everyone's eyes lit up, as if clearing the clouds and seeing the fog.

Everyone is one of the most intelligent people among human beings, Luo Sheng immediately understood when he said this.

Xu Zhijun said excitedly: "Excellent idea, Mr. Luo deserves to be a design genius. In a word, it is very important! Why didn't so many of us think of it?"

...

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