mijobooks Chapter 473 Self-developed baseband chip
Chapter 473 Self-developed baseband chip
Hong Kong, New Territories North District.
From the outside, the building looks like an ordinary logistics warehouse. It has gray cement walls, a rusty corrugated iron roof, and no sign at the entrance. The only unusual thing is the barbed wire fence around the perimeter—it has an extra layer compared to a typical warehouse, and there are two security cameras at the corners.
Zhao Hu swiped his card at the entrance, and the iron gate slid open with a hum. The car drove in, and there was another door inside. This door required iris recognition.
Liang Mengsong stood inside the second door waiting for them. He was wearing a faded polo shirt, and had dark circles under his eyes, but he looked very energetic.
"Mr. Ling, welcome to Noah's Ark."
Ling Yun looked around. The corridor was lined with floor-to-ceiling windows, inside which rows of oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and spectrum analyzers displayed a dense array of waveforms and numbers. All the windows were sealed shut, and the air conditioning vents were fitted with metal mesh. A prominent red sign on the wall read: "No electronic equipment allowed."
"Complete physical isolation." Liang Mengsong led the way. "All the servers used for research and development are not connected to the external network. Data entry and exit rely entirely on encrypted hard drives, and each entry and exit from the hard drive must be registered. Team members have signed confidentiality agreements and cannot tell anyone what they are doing—including their families."
Lingyun stood in the middle of the corridor, watching through the glass as a young engineer adjusted a circuit board. The young man held an oscilloscope probe in his left hand and typed parameters on the keyboard with his right, while a fork from a bowl of instant noodles was still stuck in the noodles.
"What did he tell his family?"
"He said he was doing mobile phone repair in Hong Kong," Leung Mong-sung said. "His wife believed him."
The meeting room was a small room without windows, with a whiteboard hanging on the wall, covered with waveform diagrams and spectrum allocation tables.
Ling Yun pulled up a chair and sat down. "Just tell me the progress."
Liang Mengsong placed a report on the table. "The WCDMA baseband chip architecture design is complete and has entered the logic simulation stage. The four major modules—RF front-end, analog baseband, digital baseband, and protocol stack—are all progressing simultaneously." He turned to the last page. "But I have to be honest. The complexity of the communication protocol stack far exceeds our previous expectations. Just conducting compatibility testing with the networks of over two hundred operators worldwide will take at least a year. Add to that the patent wall circumvention design—"
How do you bypass patent barriers?
"Qualcomm has nearly two thousand core patents related to WCDMA, a dense array of them, some of which are unavoidable." Liang Mengsong pulled out a patent map, on which dense red dots almost covered the entire frequency band. "We are working on several solutions. One is to buy their license, but Qualcomm's price is too high—five percent of the price of each phone. Another is to negotiate cross-licensing with them, exchanging our non-communication patents for it."
Lingyun took the patent map and studied it for a long time. A helicopter flew by outside the window, the sound of its propellers humming through the wall.
"Qualcomm is still excluding our proposal from 3GPP," Liang Mengsong added.
Ling Yun put down the patent map. "Let's not talk about Qualcomm for now. What else does your team need?"
"People," Liang Mengsong said. "There are no more than two thousand people in the world who can develop a baseband protocol stack. Most of them are at Qualcomm, Ericsson, and Huawei. We've poached more than forty people through various channels, but it's still not enough." He paused, "There's still time. If everything goes smoothly, we can finish it by the end of 2007. If not, 2008."
"Then let's postpone it to 2008," Ling Yun said. "We don't compete with others on speed for baseband chips; we compete on self-reliance and control. As long as we succeed, a delay of one or two years is acceptable."
Ling Yun stood up and walked to the whiteboard. He picked up a pen and drew a box next to the waveform graph, writing two words inside: Patent.
"If Qualcomm won't grant us a license, we'll find our own way around it. If we can't find a way around it, we'll use non-communication patents to cross-promote with them. If all else fails, we'll have our legal department litigate against them globally. The longer the patent war drags on, the more Qualcomm will suffer—their business model relies on collecting patent fees, and if it drags on for a year, their losses will be much greater than ours."
He turned around.
"The Noah's Ark project has been underway for almost three years since it was first launched. I'm not here today to urge progress. I want to tell you something in person—what you're doing is building the heart of China's mobile phone industry."
Just then, the door was pushed open. A young engineer peeked in, saw Ling Yun, and paused for a moment, "President Ling—"
"Come in."
The young engineer held a green PCB board covered in soldered wires, resembling an electronic spider with tentacles. "Mr. Liang, the simulation of the baseband demodulation module is successful. The waveform is out." He placed the board on the table, his fingers trembling slightly.
Liang Mengsong took the board, looked at the waveform recordings on it, and remained silent for several seconds. He then handed the board to Ling Yun.
"Mr. Ling, look at this. This is the first time our own baseband chip has successfully demodulated a WCDMA signal."
Ling Yun took the board. The wires trembled slightly in his hand. He placed the board on the table and looked at the young engineer. "What's your name?"
"Zhang Hao."
"Zhang Hao, what you did today will be written into a book someday." Ling Yun extended his hand. "Thank you for your hard work."
Zhang Hao wiped his hands on his pants before taking Ling Yun's hand. His palms were sweaty.
Liang Mengsong erased the waveform diagram on the whiteboard and drew a new one, the pen tip tapping on the whiteboard. The sound of the helicopter outside the window faded into the distance, leaving only the hum of the air conditioner and the sound of Liang Mengsong drawing in the conference room.
Ling Yun sat in his chair, staring at the densely packed waveforms and spectrum allocation tables on the whiteboard. He recalled 1998 in Jinan, when Ni Guangnan first spoke to him about the chip industry chain. Ni Guangnan had said that lithography machines might take twenty years. The same was true for baseband chips—from the initial project proposal to making the first phone call, every step was fraught with difficulties.
He took out his phone and sent a text message to Ni Guangnan: "The Noah's Ark project is progressing smoothly. The baseband chip is more difficult than we imagined, but it's feasible."
A few seconds later, Ni Guangnan replied: "If it's feasible, that's good. If it's feasible, the rest is just a matter of time."
Ling Yun put his phone back in his pocket. A flurry of footsteps echoed down the corridor as several engineers pushed a new spectrum analyzer towards the lab, the wheels clattering over the seams of the floor. Ling Yun stood up and looked out the window at the young engineer adjusting a circuit board—his instant noodles were cold, the fork still stuck in them, and he was still hunched over the oscilloscope. The Hong Kong sky outside was hazy, and the distant Shenzhen Bay was faintly visible through the gray mist.