Technology invades the modern world

Chapter 414 This hatred will never end

Fujio Mitarai frowned as he looked at the supplementary contract signed with China on the screen.

"China has recently added three supplementary agreements. In addition to the already signed order for 20 FPA-1200NZ2C complete machines, three supplementary agreements have been added."

This includes purchasing enough spare parts for equipping 100 machines, covering all core replaceable modules, from laser controllers to robotic arms for wafer transfer, leaving nothing out.

In addition, a five-year, exorbitantly priced long-term supply contract was signed for imprinting resin and template substrates.

They prepaid for three years' worth of the full amount, and requested a supply volume sufficient to support 10% of the world's existing semiconductor production capacity.

The strangest one was the third one. They sent us a list requesting the purchase of chemical safety data sheets for all the specialty chemicals used for cleaning and maintaining our equipment on the production line, including even the detailed technical specifications of the plasma cleaner we had custom-made for cleaning templates.

Fujio Mitarai murmured, "This is not a procurement by China."

This is a systematic technical reverse engineering preparation. They not only want to buy NIL lithography machines, but also want to reverse engineer the chemical material synthesis methods that come with NIL lithography machines.

This is indeed very much in the style of China.

But what about the meaning?

Ogawa Kazuto nodded: "This is also my confusion. We haven't even determined the use of the NIL lithography machine yet, and we haven't officially put it into the industrial mass production process. The Chinese are already in a hurry to reverse engineer it. What's the point?"

The Chinese seem to be even more confident than we are, claiming that this technological route is of great value and will definitely replace traditional EUV lithography machines.

This is truly perplexing.

According to the data transmitted back from the backend, the NIL lithography machines delivered to China have not been put into mass production, let alone a single formal production run.

Where does their confidence come from?

Lithography machines will always have backdoors provided, as is the case with ASML, and even more so with Canon's most advanced 5nm NIL lithography machine.

As for being able to remotely shut down the computer and prevent you from starting it, that's possible, but unlikely.

It's not that the Americans aren't that bad, but rather that what they handed over to China included the NIL manufacturing technology itself. You can remotely shut down the machine, and then they can disassemble it to replicate the NIL lithography machine.

It will only make China spend more time.

Foreign traders don't feel the urgency of time nearly as much as their Chinese counterparts.

"I must go see Minister Saito." After hearing what Ogawa Kazuto said, Mitarai Fujio felt the same unease and made his decision.

The next day, the office of Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, Katsuya Saito, was just as sparsely furnished as that of other Japanese bureaucrats.

"President Mitarai, Vice President Ogawa, welcome." Saito Katsuya personally poured tea for them; these were all heroes who had sacrificed themselves for Japan!
"On behalf of the government, I congratulate you on the successful progress of the Canon NIL project in China."

Fujio Mitarai was seething with hatred upon hearing this. If it weren't for Chiyoda's incompetence, would Canon have sold its future to the Chinese? And how dare you offer your congratulations here?
Chiyoda is a metaphor for the power center of Japan, where the Imperial Palace, the Prime Minister's official residence, and the central government building are located.

Unfortunately, circumstances forced him to bury his resentment deep inside; Canon could hardly be considered a conglomerate.

“Minister Saito,” Fujio Mitarai said bluntly, pushing a condensed report in front of Saito, “we are not here today to deliver good news, but to issue a warning.”

He systematically reported Ogawa Kazuto's findings, along with the analysis from the company's internal expert team, to Saito.

“Therefore, Minister,” Mitarai concluded, his tone extremely serious, yet tinged with an unspeakable hatred—hatred not directed at China, but at Chiyoda.

"Our guess is that they are trying to replicate the entire NIL technology ecosystem in a comprehensive manner."

Therefore, I urge the government to reassess the risks of technology exports.

At the very least, we should postpone further exports of equipment and materials until we…

“President Mitarai,” Saito interrupted him softly, “your analysis is brilliant and very accurate. Our Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and the Cabinet Information Office receive similar reports every week. We are just as clear about China’s intentions as you are.”

"Then why?!" Fujio Mitarai couldn't help but raise his voice, "Why should we continue to sell to them?"

“Because we have no other choice.” Saito’s smile remained unchanged, but his eyes were filled with helplessness.

Mitarai-kun, you see this as a business competition between Canon and its Chinese counterparts.

But you must understand that from the moment China's spacecraft returned from the moon without refueling, and from the moment China successfully recovered its spacecraft in our coastal waters, we lost the right to independently set commercial rules in East Asia.

He stood up, walked to the window, and looked down at the iconic pyramid-shaped top of the Capitol Building.

"On the one hand, it was our ally, Washington, who designed this trap. It was that new-century MacArthur, John Adams Morgan, who pointed a gun at our heads and ordered us to sell NIL to China."

If we unilaterally stop exports now, who do you think will be the first to stop us? Not Beijing, but Washington.

They will say we have undermined the hard-won gains aimed at easing regional tensions.

On the other hand, there's our neighbor with a huge appetite, Yanjing.

It was only after Prime Minister Sugawara came to power that we were able to stabilize bilateral economic and trade relations with great difficulty.

Now, are we going to tear up a multi-billion dollar, ongoing business contract because of a future risk that we ourselves cannot even verify?

Is this tantamount to actively inviting the other side to directly affix a ban to our automotive or machine tool industries?

Saito Katsuya turned around and looked at Mitarai Fujio, who was speechless.

"So, Mitarai-kun, tell me, what can we do?"
Offend America, and we will die instantly in finance, technology, and security.

Offending China will also lead to our economic, trade, and security demise, albeit a slow and painful one.

“And now,” he spread his hands, drawing a final conclusion, “since the Americans have made the decision for us, allowing us to export; and since the Chinese are willing to pay us generous cash far above market value.”

So why don't we, as people who have already lost the ability to resist, smile and collect the toll in full?
Besides, even if China were to successfully replicate this, the one who would be most troubled is not us, but Washington.

What they perceived as a trap was actually not Chinese, but their own; they built and destroyed the core curtain themselves.

Isn't this a manifestation of arrogance by our dear ally?

As for Tokyo, and as for us, what crime have we committed? We are simply carrying out a mission from our allies to ease tensions with our biggest rival—this is Washington's mission, not Beijing's.

Saito was speaking, but Mitarai Fujio sensed madness and hatred emanating from him. It seemed that the other man's hatred for America was no less than his hatred for Chiyoda.

Kazuto Ogawa remarked that such a powerful figure was indeed a powerful figure; speaking of Japan's current dire situation, he remained remarkably calm and composed, as if they were the victors and China the defeated party in their recent silent confrontation. Wasn't this, in itself, a kind of winning philosophy?

So sell!

We'll sell them as many as they want!

We will provide whatever they want, as long as it doesn't violate the final red line drawn by America.

We will use the astronomical sums of cash paid by the Chinese people to invest in our technological research and development. What Canon wants to do is to be the one that runs faster in this race.

As for whether they are copying our technology, that's not our concern. That's the problem with our distant ally who designed this trap.

Even if the future becomes a problem, it will be the result of their own cleverness.

From this moment forward, we are merely guards at a tollbooth, nothing more.

At the headquarters of Apollo Technology, founders and technical leaders from four companies—Cambricon, Moore Threads, Lingxi Technology, and Biren Technology—gathered to compete for the sole remaining spot.

As colleagues in China's chip industry, we have a good relationship, but today, no one spoke. Even when we were waiting in the lounge, no one spoke. After all, this may be related to the ticket to becoming a trillion-dollar company in the future, and the unit of measurement could even be US dollars.

Upon entering the conference room, they assumed the audience would be filled with experts who would take turns asking questions, much like a major project with a committee responsible for the selection process.

To everyone's surprise, there was only one excessively young man sitting below.

Upon entering, one is greeted by a young woman who appears to be a secretary.

"Everyone, I am Lin Ran. We will take turns starting in alphabetical order. Without further ado, I will ask you some technical questions during the presentation."

The computer and projector are right on the stage, let's get started.

Each of the four companies submitted a detailed technical white paper, along with a prototype of their respective right-brain chip.

Lin Ran had only skimmed through it before; today was their defense session.

The company representatives present understood perfectly well that, besides Lin Ran, who else could have such decision-making power?

The other party is indeed qualified enough, and has no vested interest in any of the four companies.

The team from Biren Technology was the first to enter.

Their chip design philosophy is radical, pursuing ultimate performance from the very beginning.

The introductions of companies and individuals are brief, only a few sentences long, before quickly moving on to the professional content.

"Our philosophy is that the right brain should not only be able to perceive, but also to think and perform complex nonlinear reasoning. Our Kunlun chip adopts a unique hybrid precision architecture that supports both analog and digital computing."

We have integrated a large number of reconfigurable computing units, aiming to achieve true hardware programmability.

This means that our chip can dynamically adjust its internal structure according to different tasks to achieve maximum efficiency.

Lin Ran asked, "While your hybrid precision architecture theoretically boasts high performance, its actual engineering implementation is extremely complex. How do you ensure yield and cost control? Moreover, the stability of simulation calculations has always been a challenge in the industry. How do you address these issues?"

Their technical lead: "We do face challenges, but we believe that high risk can lead to high reward."

We have overcome several key technologies and achieved satisfactory results in a laboratory environment.

As for costs, we believe they will gradually decrease as production scales up.

Most importantly, our partner is you, Professor. We believe that only a sufficiently radical approach can achieve the greatest benefits, and we need your assistance to overcome the technical difficulties.

Then came the Cambrian period.

The CEO personally took the stage, and his PowerPoint presentation showcased Cambricon's profound expertise in the field of neural network processing units.

"We believe that the core of the right brain lies in efficient pattern recognition and low-power real-time processing. Our Siyuan series chips have been widely used in ByteDance's cloud inference and edge computing."

Our right-brain chip, codenamed Ziguang, is based on the Siyuan architecture and further optimizes the hardware support for spiking neural networks.

It has 1024 neuron clusters, each containing 256 programmable neurons.

Our advantage lies in our ability to quickly reuse IP from existing product lines and create a mass-producible, reliable solution.

This is actually a copy of Intel's Liohi chip design concept.

"The Siyuan series is mainly designed for convolutional neural networks. How do your power consumption and latency perform when processing SNNs? I am concerned that your architecture may face bottlenecks when the complexity of the task increases exponentially."

Cambricon's CEO candidly replied, "We have indeed done a lot of reconstruction on the underlying hardware of SNN, but the current architecture does have room for improvement when dealing with complex multimodal perception. However, we are confident that we can make up for it through software and algorithm optimization."

The four companies took turns speaking, and Lin Ran asked some questions after listening to each one, without showing any particular bias.

"Thank you all for coming. Everyone's proposals are very feasible."

"I won't keep you waiting long. Tonight, I will call the winner. If you don't receive a call, it means we won't have a chance to cooperate this time, but I believe we will have the opportunity to cooperate in the future."

Lin Ran finally went to the podium, gave a concluding speech to the eight representatives from the four companies in the audience, and then nodded and left the meeting room.

"I was even more nervous than when I gave my speech at my own wedding."

"After all, this is the ticket to the Crimson-Huawei ecosystem. It's no wonder we're nervous. Once it's confirmed, the market value of the A-shares market could reach one trillion RMB. This isn't just a ticket; it's a lottery ticket."

"Old Zhang, your plan is pretty good."

"Old Chen, I feel like your plan is better."

Just like after a 100-meter sprint, the stadium, which had been filled with focused concentration, was immediately filled with noisy discussions, as everyone wanted to know who had won the race.

At 10 p.m. that night, Zhang Jianzhong's phone rang. His phone had been ringing countless times. There were harassing calls, calls from his wife, investors, and subordinates. Everyone, like him, wanted to know the answer.

This time, it was a call from an unknown number in Shenhai.

"Hello, is this Mr. Zhang?"
This morning in the conference room, I was Zhou Lei, Mr. Lin's secretary. Congratulations on your successful selection for DeepRed's right-brain chip strategy. Our company's official number has already sent you a text message with an invitation code. Tomorrow, our company's Vice President, Ms. Li Xiaoman, will be waiting for you in her private office to discuss further cooperation matters. Whether Mr. Lin will meet with you depends on tomorrow's arrangements.

Have a nice evening.

(End of this chapter)