Rewrite the Technological Landscape

The mobile phone business department is directly located on the floors of the R\u0026D center, because the current mobile phone business department is basically doing research and development. The employees of this business department don’t have the habit of saying hello when they see Meng Qian. Usually, the person in charge comes to ask Meng Qian. Why did the others lower their heads and continue doing what they came here for.

Naturally, Meng Qian didn't bother them, so he took a look at the development of several core technologies. The first thing he checked was the multi-touch technology, which is a very important technology in future smartphones.

Before the birth of the iPhone, most mobile phones had to have physical buttons. Without buttons, there was no way to realize the functions of the mobile phone. Even if there was a touch phone, it was a simple design of a button or a direction button, and this design The reason is because resistive touch screens don't work well.

The appearance of the iPhone broke this tradition, using capacitive screens and multi-touch technology to realize a mobile phone without a physical keyboard.

However, with regard to multi-touch technology, some people on the Internet seem to think that Apple has a monopoly on multi-touch technology. Because multi-touch technology can be traced back to the multi-touch screen that senses index finger pressure invented by the University of Toronto in 1982. Microsoft began to study this thing in 1984, and then IBM followed suit. The world's first The touch-screen smartphone was the IBM Simon released by IBM in 1993.

Moreover, there are many patents involved in multi-touch technology, thousands of them.

So Apple only acquired the multi-touch products produced by John Elias and Rooney Westerman in 1999, iGesture board and multi-touch keyboard and its patents, but in the field of multi-touch technology, Apple achieved If there is no monopoly, Dafeng Group will also not be able to achieve monopoly, so don't even think about it.

Therefore, it is not accurate to say that Apple monopolizes or creates multi-touch technology.

Just like Elan, a company in Taiwan Province, made Apple pay him 5 million yuan for patents related to multi-touch technology before, and reached a patent cross agreement with Apple.

As a reborn person, Meng Qian must have started laying out various important patents that will be used in the future when the company had some funds in 2001. Of course, multi-touch technology is indispensable. Now I came to the R\u0026D center to inquire. The company has more than 200 patents on multi-touch technology, and Meng Qian is basically at ease. If Apple wants to make trouble in this field in the future, the big deal is to sue each other.

With the multi-touch technology, the next problem that needs to be solved is to find a suitable LCD screen manufacturer. This issue has caused heated debates in the company. The point of contention is whether to use the company's own products.

It’s been a while since we’ve cooperated with Sony in R\u0026D, and we’ve also bought some lifetime patent licenses from Sony. Dafeng Group’s current LCD screen production level is capable of doing it, but there’s still a gap between Sony and Samsung, and they’re in the second echelon, so some people I don't agree to use my own products. Since this phone is going to the extreme, I still use Sony's screen.

But the other group raised two questions. One is that it has a supply advantage to use its own products for such important components, and the higher the product sales, the greater the supply advantage. When Apple chose the screen back then, it was also There are thousands of choices, and one of the most important selection criteria is the ability to supply goods in a timely manner. One of the reasons why the Nikon lithography machine is so good is because the lens is made by ourselves.

At the same time, this faction of employees thinks that our backwardness is only temporary. As long as the company is willing to do something, it will surpass Samsung and Sony sooner or later. Whether it is self-confidence or not, many employees of Dafeng Group do have strong self-confidence.

As the date of the mobile phone launch event drew closer, Meng Qian finally made a decision to use his own screen. This decision was somewhat willful.

After leaving the multi-touch R\u0026D center, Meng Qian went to the mold R\u0026D center. This is a department full of complaints, because there is no traditional mold to learn from the appearance of the brand-new mobile phone, and Meng Qian's requirements are very high. Dozens of them were rejected by Meng Qian.

Another department that is about to be driven crazy by Meng Qian is the UI design department, a mobile phone that everyone has never seen before, a brand new mobile phone that is completely imagined by Meng Qian's description, how to do UI design is very difficult.

Even if Meng Qian has actually dictated the common UI design of later generations of smartphones, it is not easy for UI designers to turn Meng Qian’s dictation into products, and some people who are engaged in design always like to bring their own ideas .

So Meng Qian has seen various UI design schemes. Before, he saw a smartphone interface designed by a UI designer imitating the computer interface. The left half is the program, and the right half is just empty there.

Going forward, Meng Qian finally saw a department where everyone was talking and laughing, and everyone seemed to be very happy, that is the system department. In fact, it is reasonable to say that the system department should be the hardest, at least on Apple's side.

According to the records of works such as "The Secret History of iPhone" and "Jobs Biography", the programmers in charge of iPhone system design work more than 80 hours per week on average. Many of them sleep directly in the company and haven't been home for a long time, and divorced a large number of employees. .

As I said before, the mobile phone system and the computer system are actually two different things. It is not easy to build a huge smartphone system, but I also said before that the most difficult part of the system is the design and architecture link. You need to know what the system you design is probably So, what functions are needed, for the Apple employees who are still in the imagination stage of the Apple system, it is very tiring to do it.

For Meng Qian, the main design direction is generally clear. When he participated in the research and development of the smart operating system, he studied the Android architecture for a long time, and he was an architect, so Meng Qian took two The architects worked together to figure out the future company's smartphone system architecture.

However, there are still many problems in the details, and the employees work overtime every day. It can only be said that the psychological pressure should not be as great as that of Apple's employees responsible for system development.

The next very important department is the mobile phone chip department, but on the chip issue, Meng Qian has made a compromise, that is the baseband, as I said before when cooperating with the Beidou system, Dafeng Group has invested a lot of money in the research and development of the baseband chip , but that was for the 4G era, and the 3G era directly chose to compromise, because the input-output ratio is really not cost-effective.

However, unlike Apple that will use Broadcom's baseband chips, Gale Group chose Texas Instruments, the current leader in baseband chips in the 3G era.

However, although the baseband chip has been compromised, the mobile phone processor Meng Qian does not intend to compromise. If there is no accident, the iPhone 2G will still use Samsung's ARM architecture chip, and ARM will also develop rapidly, but that is a matter of a lifetime.

In this life, it is impossible for Meng Qian to be idle. In terms of chip architecture, Meng Qian cannot bring a very mature architecture to employees like the system, but he has been working hard to participate.

Meng Qian wants to create a brand-new architecture, similar to RISC-V, one of the four major architectures in the future, which is an open source instruction set architecture based on a reduced instruction set, but only refers to RISC-V.

The Gale Group architecture inherits several advantages of RISC-V, such as simplification, low power consumption, modularization, and scalability.

The structure of Dafeng Group focuses on these four directions. Friends who are familiar with the structure must have understood that Meng Qian's goal is definitely not just a mobile phone.

In fact, the architecture is just the architecture. The same architecture is placed in the hands of Intel and AMD, and the chips produced are different, because there are many other tasks on top of the architecture, involving RTL coding, layout, semiconductor manufacturing process, packaging, etc. A series of technologies, this is a systems engineering.

It's like giving two authors the same outline, but the novels they write must be different. An outline is just an outline.

Therefore, the reason why RISC-V is successful is not that the architecture itself is so powerful, but that the advantages of RISC-V can give users great flexibility to meet different application scenarios.

Because of this, RISC-V is especially suitable for closed or semi-closed products with less ecological dependence, deeply embedded or emerging Internet of Things, edge computing fields including embedded artificial intelligence and other applications, and scenarios that require customization.

But as a new architecture, it will inevitably face a natural problem, ecology.

To give the simplest example, when RISC-V first came out, there were no related compilers, development tools, and software development environments. Even if they were available later, they were not as good as commercial compilers and IDEs for ARM and X86.

The ecosystem of the instruction set architecture is a very complicated and long process like the growth of the ecosystem of the system, and it is normal for ten or eight years.

Of course, the most important thing is that there must be a leader, like x86 has windows, x86 can really establish an ecosystem, and ARM can only have the success of the future when it meets smart phones.

As for the current Dafeng Group, at least Meng Qian’s goal is to become the leader of smartphones. Secondly, Dafeng Group has a great foundation. It can make IDE for its own architecture and configure industrial software for its own architecture. Still holding the lithography machine.

This is why Meng Qian had to put pressure on his employees. The success of smartphones, on the surface, means that Dafeng Group can lead an important future product, but more importantly, it can lead a structure, lead a batch of technologies, and create a Ecology, breaking through a monopoly, so that Huaxia no longer has to be controlled by others in an important field.

Even let others be controlled by Huaxia.