Chu Qing, CEO of Unisoc: The end of Moore's Law is an opportunity for the rise of Chinese chips

[Host]: Hello, everyone. Welcome to "Brainstorm". I am the host Luo Xin. In 2019, 5G will be commercially available soon. Each of us has a smartphone in our hands. You will find that one feature of this phone is changing. What is the change? In the past, our mobile phones only had a few megabytes of large-capacity photos and often jammed. But now you will find that we can store and send things, including videos of several G, through mobile phones. Since humans have this semiconductor chip technology, you will find that the hardware is getting smaller and smaller, and even concentrated on a very small chip, but its computing power is beyond our imagination. Today we have invited guests from the Chinese chip industry to discuss the Chinese chip: how to start the "core" journey.

[Chu Qing]: Unisoc is a chip design company focusing on mobile communications and the Internet of Things. Currently, Unisoc has grown into the world's third largest mobile phone chip design company, China's largest pan-chip supplier and China's leading 5G communication chip company.

The mobile phone we are looking at now is a 5G prototype of Spreadtrum. Its core computing power is no less than that of a laptop, or even a desktop. And with such powerful computing power, it does not have a common cooling fan in our computers. What does this mean? You can look at the development of chip technology in the past five years. The most advanced processes are all used for mobile phone chips. Mobile phone chips are now a field with very concentrated competition, and the core competitiveness is reflected here.

This is the first 5G chip of Unisoc. We named it after a mountain. Tibet is the place with the most snow-capped mountains above 8,000 meters in the world, and Makalu is the fifth highest peak in the world. So we named the 5G communication technology platform of Unisoc after Makalu. Its architecture is very complex. Throughout the past decade, innovations and breakthroughs in mobile phone chip architecture have emerged one after another. Entering the 5G era will definitely bring new architectures, and Unisoc is fully prepared in this regard.

[Host]: Now some people are talking about Moore's Law, which states that performance doubles every 18 months, energy consumption is halved, and size is halved. So will our chips become smaller and smaller in the future? What is its limit?

However, as Moore's Law has developed to this day, these three horses can no longer run. We can see that with the rapid evolution of technology, the benefits of power consumption, speed, and cost are not so great. What impact will this have on industrial development? At present, the development cycle of each generation of technology has been lengthened; in the future, the end of Moore's Law will give rise to the development of new technologies, and promote the birth of new things and new startups.

So don't be afraid of the death of Moore's Law. We need to understand this from the perspective of the industry. It represents an industrial strategy. The West has been leading for the past 40 to 50 years due to the leadership and following of this strategy. Now it is coming to an end. For Chinese chip companies, we must take advantage of this opportunity. After the end of Moore's Law, new industrial competition areas and models will inevitably emerge. This is our future.

[Host]: What is the biggest shortcoming in the development of China's chip industry? China is already the world's largest market. There is no market problem, nor is there a shortage of money. Is it a shortage of talent?

[Chu Qing]: The scale and quality of talent training in China's integrated circuit industry are very high, which is one of the important success factors of China's chip industry. However, in the high-tech industry, people always confuse the tree with the fruit. Many companies have always had a misunderstanding that when it comes to talent, they think of recruiting at high prices. In fact, when it comes to talent, corporate management is the real tree, and talent is the fruit that is borne by relying on this tree. Especially in chip companies, if you have not been involved in large-scale development, you have no idea how many people it depends on.

For example, we have invested nearly 2,000 people in the Makalu 5G platform of Spreadtrum, and these 2,000 people have been working together for a long time, so management is the foundation. Good management can iterate talents in a positive way and achieve the sustainable development of corporate talents.

[Host]: We have set our sights on Pudong in Shanghai. Pudong is the most important production and birthplace of China's semiconductor integrated technology, including the chip industry. In your opinion, in what areas can Pudong improve in the future so that it can better play the role of a "leader" in the field of integrated circuits in China?

[Chu Qing]: From the perspective of the semiconductor industry, Shanghai is definitely a high-tech city. Pudong, in particular, is not an exaggeration to call it China's Silicon Valley. Its charm can be summed up in one word: "rule by doing nothing". The government repairs the infrastructure and improves the business environment, and stands aside modestly with the positioning of serving enterprises. The government does not "care" about enterprises, and enterprises do not need to "care" about the government, and they can concentrate on their own operations. Therefore, so many talents and enterprises gather here.

In the future, we hope that Pudong, as a center for technological innovation, can strengthen the protection of intellectual property rights, strictly control and carefully select. IP (intellectual property) is the most core achievement and asset of a high-tech company. If this asset is not protected, the huge human, material, financial and investment resources of the enterprise will not be guaranteed.