Technology invades the modern world

The problem in Chapter 412 has been solved.
When Jonathan and Lin Ran frequently mentioned John Morgan Sr. in their conversation, he was living a life similar to MacArthur in Tokyo.

Since the agreement was reached between Beijing and Washington, John Morgan Sr. has been staying in Tokyo, only flying to Shanghai once to meet with Lin Ran.

The Tokyo-Shanghai route is too close.

John Morgan Sr. did not stay in any embassy or official residence, but instead booked the entire top floor of the Empire Hotel.

Since Tokyo changed prime ministers, he has been meeting daily with Japan's zaibatsu leaders, faction elders, and ministers in the new cabinet, attempting to exert his own influence over the country.

He led Wall Street consortiums to numerous successes in the Taipei financial market, especially after the recent perfect storm of gains, which brought his influence in the global financial world to its peak.

John Morgan Sr. felt that his life so far had been incredibly dull. This was what life should be like! Using a story he had recently learned from ancient Chinese books, his collaboration with Lin Ran was described as: "High mountains and flowing water seeking a kindred spirit."

Of course, his good life means that others are not happy. Those who are unhappy are the financial professionals in Taipei. Taipei's local businesses, from finance to employment to the consumer market, are in a situation comparable to the Asian financial crisis.

What's even more devastating is that, compared to the Asian financial crisis where the targeting was merely economic, this time it's a double blow—both economic and political—a double blow with no end in sight.

After receiving Lin Ran's call, John Morgan sat opposite Lin Ran in his office early the next morning. Lin Ran poured red wine into his glass and said, "Please!"

Old John Morgan picked up his glass, closed his eyes, and took a sniff: "Lafite? How did you know this is my favorite among high-end red wines? It seems like Chinese people like this one, but the vintage isn't great, not the legendary 1959 or 1961?"

Lin Ran smiled, because we first met at the Russell Erskine Hotel, a high-end hotel in Huntsville, where John Morgan was drinking Lafite.

As for why 1961 and 1959 are legendary years.

In the spring of the former, Bordeaux suffered an extremely severe frost that destroyed a large number of grape buds. The subsequent flowering period was also cold and rainy, resulting in extremely low grape yields. However, from August to October, the harvest season, the weather became perfect, resulting in an unprecedented and extremely concentrated level of flavor compounds in these grapes.

The latter, due to the hot, sunny, and very dry weather throughout its growing season, had a normal grape yield that year, but extremely high sugar content and exceptionally rich fruit flavor.

As for 1960, it was a terrible year for the grapes needed for winemaking, and even the wines produced by Château Lafite Rothschild were lackluster.

"Lafite, 1960," Lin Ran said calmly, raising his glass. "You don't need to know the reason."

“Professor,” Morgan said, his face beaming with pride after finishing his wine, “I must say that last week was our highest-return investment this year, no, in the last ten years.”

He picked up the encrypted tablet on the table and pulled up the latest battle report.

"What happened around the neon lights completely shattered the last and most stubborn psychological defense line of the Taipei financial market, namely the expectation of regional cooperation." Morgan's tone was like that of someone doing financial statement analysis.

Globally, only Lin Ran and Da T are qualified to listen to John Morgan Sr.'s financial statement analysis.

"When the market finally realizes that no one will defend them, the flight of capital will no longer be an outflow, but an avalanche."

Over the past five days, the Taiwan Stock Exchange Weighted Index has fallen by 12%, with net foreign capital outflows exceeding US$20 billion, and the New Taiwan Dollar's exchange rate against the US Dollar has broken through the 32 mark.

“Our alliance fund,” he smiled, “has made an additional $6.5 billion in profit this week through perfect operations in the derivatives market.”

Their market-stabilizing fund is now like a desperate gambler who has thrown all his last chips on the table, but unfortunately, we can see all his cards.

“Congratulations, Mr. Morgan.” Lin Ran’s tone was calm. “It seems that the task of dismantling the stage is basically complete. Now, we just need you to move what needs to be moved and give us what is rightfully ours.”

Morgan nodded and said, "Of course, we will not stop any of their local businesses from relocating to the mainland."

John Morgan Sr. used the mainland term.

Lin Ran continued, "Elon ran into a little trouble in Washington, but he successfully exposed the corruption and incompetence of the old NASA to the light of day."

But he discovered that after demolishing a dilapidated building, he found himself standing on ruins, without even a usable brick. He needed a general contractor who knew how to build skyscrapers, a partner who could reintegrate and digest the remnants of companies like Boeing and Lockheed, and create a brand new, efficient business empire.

John Morgan laughed loudly, "Professor, Elon is quite something. I never expected him to think of asking you to be his advocate."

He suppressed his smile and said seriously, "Of course, Professor, we must talk to Elon. Whether it's us, Boeing, Lockheed, or Raytheon, the capital behind them all comes from NASA's orders. Musk can do whatever he wants, but he can't affect our business."

Lin Ran nodded: "Including Collins Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney, and a series of other companies."

These are all subsidiaries of Raytheon, and Raytheon and its subsidiaries are among NASA's most important suppliers.

Behind Raytheon stands the Adams family, as depicted in John Adams Morgan Sr.

John Morgan Sr.: "We knew all along that Musk would come to us to talk; it was just a matter of time and who would have the upper hand."

He doesn't want to lose control. He thinks that if he finds you, you find me, and then I find him, he'll maintain the upper hand.

After John Morgan finished speaking, his gaze sharpened for a moment before softening again: "But Professor, for the sake of this glass of Lafite today, I will send someone to talk to him. It's just a bit of a shame about the vintage, 1960. That's not a very good year."

At the same time, it was almost Chinese New Year. Lin Ran wondered, why is it always at this time that we have to gather manpower to solve major problems?

Last time, the Shockley-Quisser limit, which broke through the limits of photovoltaic mass production, was solved, allowing the photoelectric conversion efficiency of single-layer solar cells to exceed 33.7%. Now, photovoltaic modules with a photoelectric conversion efficiency of up to 60% under the new structure are about to be mass-produced. Investors in the photovoltaic sector of the entire Chinese stock market are eagerly waiting for this opportunity, and they are practically breaking out of their calculators, waiting to see who will fire the first shot.

This time, the problem to be solved is the lens issue for the lithography machine.

The biggest challenge for China's lithography machine project has always been the light source and the reflector.

Without the projection lens system, which Zeiss refused to sell to ASML and which consists of more than a dozen perfect reflective mirrors and accounts for nearly 40% of the total cost of the machine, even if China's EUV lithography machine solved 99% of the problems, it would not be able to be put into production.

With the Canon FPA-1200NZ2C, a 5-nanometer NIL lithography machine, already installed and debugged in Shenhai, Lin Ran knew that the time had come to solve the lithography machine problem.

Organized by the Chinese government, personnel and facilities were arranged in advance at the Shenhai Microelectronics Institute, including Canon's NIL lithography machine.

Lin Ran entered the venue only after everyone who was supposed to have arrived had done so.

"As we all know, the biggest gap between us and EUV lithography machines lies in the lenses, which is something that cannot be overcome by manpower, time, or willpower in a short period of time."

Lenses with errors at the picometer level, and more than ten facets at that, with coupling relationships between each facet—this is the physical limit, a formidable chasm in materials science and precision manufacturing, which cannot be overcome by willpower alone.

There was dead silence in the conference room.

Everyone already knew what Lin Ran was saying. It had been mentioned countless times in internal meetings and reports to higher authorities. This was the biggest difficulty we faced, and we could only work it out slowly over time.

We can achieve good results by simply accumulating quantity. Do we really need you to come and explain this?
However, in the semiconductor field, although Lin Ran is not an expert in semiconductor manufacturing, as a top expert in artificial intelligence and the proposer of the left and right brain chip concept, he is definitely not an outsider.

"Perhaps, our approach was wrong from the very beginning."

Why must we go through the trouble of grinding a perfect lens? Can't we just print a perfect lens?

"Print?" The experts present looked at each other, seemingly having grasped a glimmer of inspiration.

Lin Ran walked to the front of the screen and pulled up a structural diagram of a meta-lens.

“Traditional lenses rely on the refraction of geometric optics. By polishing the curved surface of the glass, we can cause the light to deflect as it passes through media of different thicknesses, eventually converging at a single point. This is a physical shaping process. But meta-lenses rely on the phase modulation of wave optics,” he explained.

"We don't need to change the path of light, we just need to change the pace of the light wave."

Each nanoantenna on this planar substrate acts like a phase delayer.

When a beam of parallel light passes through it, some parts are delayed by a quarter of a wavelength, and some are delayed by half a wavelength.

By precisely controlling the phase delay at every point, we can perfectly reshape a plane wave into any desired shape after it is emitted, such as an ideal spherical wave, and focus it perfectly.

Lin Ran continued:

"Polishing lenses is an empirical physical challenge that tests the century-old craftsmanship tradition."

Designing this phase delay matrix is ​​a purely mathematical problem that tests computational ability and algorithms, which happens to be my strength.

Among the experts present was one who understood mathematics, and he asked tentatively:

"Mr. Lin, I have thought about what you said. If we want to arrange 5-nanometer antennas on a 300-millimeter diameter lens, we will be facing more than 10 to the power of 14, which is one hundred trillion independent computing units."

Each unit has multiple variables such as shape, size, and rotation angle.

This is a typical NP-hard problem with a near-infinite solution space.

He then looked down at his notebook and began calculating:

"Our fastest supercomputer can take several months to simulate a nuclear fusion reaction, while using traditional electromagnetic simulation and optimization algorithms to find the global optimal solution for the perfect phase function that Comrade Lin Ran wants on this supercomputer would probably take a thousand years to run continuously."

Lin Ran clapped lightly and said, "That's very well said. What's your name?"

The expert looked up and said, "My name is Wei Zhe."

Lin Ran grinned: "Good name, it's only one character different from the name of TSMC's current chairman."

Wei Zhe scratched his head sheepishly: "I majored in mathematics as an undergraduate, and only switched to the field of optics for my master's degree. I've always been very interested in mathematics."

Lin Ran nodded, then walked to the front of the podium and said, "That's right, he's right."

What if we could transform this problem from a search problem into a solution problem through mathematical transformation?
The challenge we are currently facing is finding an optimal arrangement for trillions of individual nanoantennas in real space.

The amount of calculation required is astronomical.

But the essence of optics is wave motion.

Any complex wave can be decomposed into a series of simple plane waves in Fourier space.

The perfect focusing function we want is actually a very simple and elegant mathematical expression in Fourier space.

Therefore, the key issue is no longer how to arrange the antennas, but whether we can find an efficient algorithm to establish the unique, deterministic mathematical bridge between the physical structure in real space and the objective function in Fourier space.

The experts present felt like they were listening to gibberish, except for Wei Zhe, who vaguely grasped the gist of it.

“If I wasn’t confident, I wouldn’t have called everyone over.”

In astrophysics, there's an algorithm called phase retrieval for processing telescope image distortion. I've combined this with the unitary transform concept from quantum computing to develop a completely new algorithm.

Lin Ran clicked the mouse, and the PPT switched to the next page: "Iterative Fourier Transform Constraint Algorithm, IFTCA"
This algorithm no longer performs a brute-force search like a headless fly; its logic is more like solving a Sudoku puzzle.

Brute-force search involves trying every single number from 0 to 9 in every cell until the answer is found.

Our IF-TCA algorithm provides a set of logical rules for computers.

In simple terms, we first define the answer we want in Fourier space, and then project this ideal answer back into real space through an inverse transform to obtain a preliminary antenna structure that is full of errors.

We then use physical constraints to correct this structure, erasing all the incorrect answers that do not conform to the laws of physics. Then we project this corrected structure, which conforms to physical reality, back into Fourier space through a positive transformation to see what it looks like now.

Finally, we compare the result with the perfect answer we originally wanted, calculate the error, use this error as the correction parameter for the next iteration, and repeat the whole process.

Through thousands of iterative corrections between the ideal and reality, this algorithm does not traverse the entire solution space. Instead, it deterministically and convergently moves along the path of fastest gradient descent towards the unique optimal solution that simultaneously satisfies both optical ideals and physical reality.

Therefore, Engineer Wei, with this algorithm, we don't need a thousand years.

With the help of existing supercomputers, solving the perfect matrix of the entire lens will only take three months.

Just as the audience erupted in an uproar, Lin Ran continued:
"Moreover, we had already calculated it out long ago. We were just waiting for Canon's NIL lithography machine to arrive, waiting for everyone to arrive, and we were ready to start working."

The camera work is just one aspect; there are many other aspects that need to be addressed.

Furthermore, to prevent similar incidents from recurring, including the recent technology leak at Huawei, we specifically invited everyone here to work together for a period of time.

Wei Zhe was stunned, because only his mathematical literacy could support him in understanding how complex the algorithm was. It was no easier than a supercomputer calculating for a thousand years. He finally understood why the person was nicknamed "God".

　Only one chapter today. I've been busy all day and haven't had a moment to rest.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)