louisehourcade Chapter 229 The World of Enlightenment
Chapter 229 The World of Enlightenment
Su Chen placed his hand on the edge of the podium, and the slide behind him slowly changed. The new slide had only four words: black background and white text.
The Enlightened World.
Hall Three was completely silent for two seconds before someone whispered the four words. Wan Shouzheng sat in the center of the first row below the stage, slowly placing the pen he was holding back on the table.
Su Chen glanced at the audience, his tone remained the same, he simply slowed down the tempo.
"In my mind, Qiming is divided into six layers. The first layer is what everyone has seen in the past two years—the submicron MEMS simulation chain. On July 1st of this year, the standard package on this chain dropped from 238,000 euros per year to 42,000 euros per year. This figure is not the price; it is the first time that the Chinese MEMS industry has been able to avoid calculating the exchange rate and its own cost for each wafer."
Some people in the audience nodded slightly. Su Zhao, who was sitting in the second row by the aisle, closed her notebook halfway when she heard the words "42,000". This was a number she had never dared to include in a PowerPoint presentation when she transferred from AVIC MEMS a year ago.
"The first floor has already been completed." Su Chen paused for a moment. "That's why we have this meeting today."
Dean Chen smiled slightly on the judging panel.
"The second layer is the industrial simulation system." Su Chen pressed the slide flipper in his hand, and the slides switched to five parallel boxes—CMOS, power devices, optoelectronics, quantum interfaces, and MEMS. "Today, there are four names on the global industrial simulation table: Siemens EDA, Synopsys, Cadence Design Systems, and Ansys. We want to be the fifth. The fifth among these five is not just about simulating MEMS; we want to complete all five boxes one by one."
When he said "one by one," he raised one hand, spread his fingers, and then slowly clenched it into a fist.
"We've given ourselves eight years to complete this project."
A voice recorder was pushed to the front of the press area on the second floor.
"The third layer." Su Chen turned the slide over to the next page. The new page had only two lines of text: Quantum-MEMS Interactive Interface Simulation; Terahertz Band Industrial Simulation.
For the first time, real whispers broke out in Hall Three.
In the sixth row, an engineer wearing reading glasses leaned his chair back forward, half of himself sticking out into the aisle. His colleague to his left, a man in his forties wearing a light gray shirt, asked him in a low voice, "This...really?"
The man with reading glasses didn't answer; he simply placed his hand on his knee.
"I know some people will laugh when they hear these two lines now," Su Chen said. "Quantum coherence time is in the nanosecond range, while the shortest step size of industrial simulators is in the microsecond range, a difference of three orders of magnitude. There is no complete material calibration library in the terahertz band globally. Without a calibration library, there is no convergence curve, and without a convergence curve, there is no industrial-grade simulation."
He explained both of these points very clearly.
"I know both of those things," he said. "I didn't bring them up because I didn't know them; I brought them up because I knew them."
The man in the sixth row, wearing reading glasses, pushed his glasses up a little.
In Huang Qiming's office in Zhongguancun, a teacup beside him had gone half-cold.
He gave a cold laugh. Unable to speak to Su Chen through the screen, he could only speak to his twenty-year-old distributor's office.
"Quantum coherence time, nanosecond level," he read to himself. "Terahertz band, no material calibration library."
He wrote these two lines down on the paper in red pen and then drew a horizontal line under them.
"These two companies—Synaptics, Cadence, Ansys, and Siemens—have a combined market capitalization of no less than two trillion US dollars, and no one has dared to touch them in the past twenty years. This young man wants to."
He put down his pen.
"Okay," he said, "okay, you touch it."
At 3:40 PM, his two agency agreements had already been withdrawn. He knew when the third one would be withdrawn. But he didn't plan to leave that night. He intended to sit in this office and watch Su Chen's speech. Even if it was just to remind himself just how unrealistic the person who withdrew his agency agreement was trying to do.
He wanted to see a joke.
In Hall Three, not a single person who was actually listening was laughing.
"The fourth layer." Su Chen flipped the slide down, "BioMEMS. Implantable blood glucose sensors, implantable neural interfaces, biodegradable in vivo sensors—there isn't a single company in the world with an industrial-grade simulation chain for this area. Our goal is to make this the first complete domestic bioMEMS simulation chain in China."
"The fifth layer." He continued flipping through the pages, "Energy MEMS. Micro solid-state battery interfaces, fuel cell catalyst layers, photovoltaic microstructures. This part corresponds to China's 'dual carbon' roadmap. What we want to do is to connect the industrial simulation chain from the laboratory all the way to the production line."
"The sixth layer." He flipped to the last page, "Space MEMS and orbit simulation. MEMS gyroscopes on satellites, spaceborne optical MEMS, and miniature sensors on deep space probes—there are three companies in the country doing this today, but none of them have a complete industrial simulation chain."
The slide remained there. No one in the audience made a sound.
In the middle seat of the seventh row, Academician Shen Shouhong rested his hands, folded, on his knees. He is seventy-three years old this year. He first proposed developing his own EDA in 1995, then again in 2003, and finally a third time in 2008. Three times, he never saw that door opened.
At that moment, he sat ramrod straight in his chair.
Dean Chen, sitting in the third row, rested his right hand on the armrest of his chair. He was seven years younger than Shen Shouhong, and he too had waited thirty years.
Without discussing it, they both stood up at the same second.
When they stood up, they didn't applaud; they just stood there.
Those were two academicians on the judging panel. Their standing up meant that everyone on the judging panel stood up today.
The engineer in the sixth row, wearing reading glasses, stood up. The man in the light gray shirt to his left followed suit. The seventh row, the eighth row, the twenty-first row, the thirtieth row, all the way to the last row of Hall Three—three thousand one hundred people, row by row, stood up.
No one was chanting slogans.
The only sound was a series of soft, neat clicks as the chair back retracted.
Su Chen gently placed the page turner on the podium.
"This is the sixth floor," he said. "We've already reached the first floor. We're on our way to the second floor. I'm telling you about the third to sixth floors because I know there's someone waiting in this room today."
He shifted his gaze to the seventh row.
Shen Shouhong didn't look up at that moment. He simply raised his hand and slowly, gently, patted it once. A second time. A third time.
The female reporter from Caijing Magazine raised the microphone, her voice steady: "Mr. Su Chen, will those two lines of text on the third floor be removed within five years, or within ten years?"
Su Chen turned his head towards her.
"The impossible is never about starting with 'being able to do it'," he said. "It's about someone stepping into the 'impossible' territory first. I can't guarantee five years, I can't guarantee ten years, about these two lines on the third layer. I can only guarantee one thing—starting today, there will be someone in Qiming Lab whose first thing to do every day when they come to work is to look at these two lines."
He paused for a moment, then added a sentence.
"It's not for making a PowerPoint presentation."
A soft laugh rippled through Hall Three.
That kind of laughter wasn't mocking; it was simply a long, collective sigh of relief from everyone present after someone finally did something that no one had dared to do for a long time.
In his office in Zhongguancun, Huang Qiming held a red pen in his hand.
He didn't laugh.
He looked at the 28-year-old young man on the screen who had just been unanimously approved by the five reviewers, and slowly, without any theatricality, uttered the words "cannot be done" as the start of a workday.
He put down the red pen.
He did not write a third sneer.
As Su Chen stepped off the stage, Wan Shouzhen stood up, stopped him, and whispered something in his ear. No one in Hall 3 heard this, except for Lin Wei, who sat in the first row closest to the aisle, who vaguely caught the three words.
"Write it down for him."
Su Chen nodded.
He knew who said those three words and who they were on behalf of.
As he walked off the stage, he passed the seventh row. Shen Shouhong stood up. Shen Shouhong extended his hand.
"Mr. Shen." Su Chen also extended his hand.
The two hands are clasped together above the aisle.
Shen Shouhong didn't say anything. He just squeezed hard for a moment, then let go.
It was a very light touch, but Su Chen could feel it.
That was in 1995, that was in 2003, that was in 2008, and that is today—the strength of four hands clasped together.
When the event ended, all the corridor lights outside were on. Dean Chen was the first to walk out. He didn't speak to any reporters, but just as he stepped out, he turned his head slightly towards Su Chen and gave a slight nod.
Su Chen stood there, watching the last academician on the judging panel walk out of Hall No. 3.
Lin Wei came from the side door, carrying a black-covered notebook. She walked up to Su Chen and handed him the notebook.
"Eight o'clock tonight, North Building Banquet Hall," she said.
How many people arrived?
"Seventy-two people have arrived," she said. "Representatives from three German companies, Bosch and ST-French, are here. Infineon only sent one deputy representative."
"Where is Weber?"
"Weber didn't come," she said. "I received a call from Berlin confirming his visit to Shanghai on August 12th."
Su Chen nodded.
He turned to the first page of his notebook. The first page contained only one line of text, which he had written himself that morning.
Open the door for your father.
He looked at the line of text for a few seconds, then closed the notebook.
Lin Wei didn't look at the words in his notebook. She simply stood half a step away from him.
"Let's go," she said.