Why modern advanced weapons and equipment increasingly rely on high-end chips
What is a high-end chip? There is no strict definition or uniform statement in the international arena. Nowadays, what people generally call a chip refers to a circuit integrated on a silicon block. So high-end chips generally refer to a qualitative leap based on ordinary chips, that is, digital logic circuits or special circuits that can be programmed on-site with higher integration, faster speed, and stronger functions. Various chips were widely used in modern weaponry as early as the 1990s.
However, since the new century has entered the era of information warfare and network warfare, the proportion of electronic equipment in weapon systems has rapidly increased, and the demand for high-end chips has also increased rapidly.
Take the fifth-generation American fighter F-35 as an example. It is known as the world's first fighter designed completely in accordance with the requirements of informationized operations, because it can achieve "seamless compatibility" with the current US military's combat system. In combat, F-35 exists as a node of an information warfare. The integrated electronic warfare system equipped on board is designed to maximize the pilot's ability to perceive the situation of the entire battlefield; its single-plane electronic warfare capabilities can even reach the performance of professional electronic warfare aircraft.
In the event of a war, the F-35 can share information with all US weapons and equipment in the air and sea in the US military's combat system. How does it do this? The foreign authoritative "Jane's Defense Yearbook" says that it "has been equipped with chips all over the body"!
In the field of missiles, radars, and aerospace defense weapons, the most used high-end chips, in addition to the commonly used high-speed and high-precision ADC/DAC chips, generally have three aspects, one is the weapon computer itself. Especially for bomb-on-board and in-flight computers, the requirements for chips are extremely strict. The second is the communication chip; it is the backbone of many weapon communication control centers. For example, C2BMC in THAAD in the United States relies on it to realize global networking. The third is to count the DSP (Digital Signal Processing) and FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) chips that are frequently used in American radars and are repeatedly named by the US Department of Commerce.
The main task of electronic equipment in modern weapon systems is simply to receive information, and output instructions after processing and rapid calculation to control the execution components. Take modern radar as an example, its data rate is as high as dozens of times per second, that is, the calculation is completed once in a fraction of a second. Therefore, the information processing chip is required to have real-time, fast, and large-capacity computing functions. At present, the most commonly used algorithms are convolution operation and Fourier transform.
These two operations are a large number of iterative processes of multiplication and accumulation, and it is the easiest to use modern signal processing chips. Modern signal processing chips have experienced five generations of products since they were launched in 1982. It is very different from the past high-speed microprocessors: First, it can complete 32-bit multiplication and accumulation in one instruction cycle, and the time is only 1- 2 nanoseconds; the second is multi-function; and can be processed in parallel; the third is the so-called "Harvard structure".
It is a memory structure that separates program instruction storage and data storage. It has an independent address bus and an independent data bus, and the two buses are time-shared and shared by the program memory and the data memory. In this way, the bottleneck of data stream transmission is overcome, and the calculation speed is greatly improved.
As for FPGA, it contains a large number of gate circuits, making the chip more integrated, faster, and more reliable. In particular, it has the ability to be reprogrammed (reconfigurable) in the system, including programmable logic blocks, programmable I/O and programmable internal wiring. As information processing, FPGA has a tendency to replace DSP.
The majority of designers are the users of the chip, of course they are "used." For example, FPGA or DSP, well-known FPGA manufacturers in the United States, such as Xilinx (Chinese name Xilinx), Altera, etc. have established sales offices in China, with sufficient supply and comprehensive services, and even development tools are ready for you.
Every time a new model is released, we will train you for free, which greatly facilitates your design work, and can even make many “innovations”. Of course, these companies make a lot of money, which is roughly what some people call a "win-win". A senior academician put it well: Many achievements are now based on the use of foreign chips; and they often claim to be number one in the world. This is not "to dress up tomorrow with what others did yesterday"!
We can see from the published data and pictures of the S-300 (such as the S-300-2 system sold by Russia to Greece) that its fire control radar signal processing also uses FFT technology. Each range channel of the radar also realizes the Doppler velocity branch through FFT operation. But Russia is composed of small-scale integrated circuits (ICs).
A distance channel must be made into a cabinet, while the United States only needs a piece of FPGA or DSP chip (and high-speed and high-precision ADC/DAC chip) and a printed circuit board. Therefore, Russian electronic devices often feel silly, big, and crude, and are often looked down upon by some domestic scholars. But Russia has his methods, which does not prevent his S-300 and S-400 from becoming world-class air defense missile systems.
Why can't we make chips like Americans?
I have never worked in semiconductors and chips. It is not qualified to make irresponsible remarks on the current chip problem. But it can reflect some usage conditions and opinions from the user's point of view. On April 18, 2018, the second day after the United States announced the "ban on sale", the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences held a roundtable meeting of experts in Beijing. The name of the meeting was "Why can't we make chips like Americans?". However, according to the report of a reporter from the "Economic Observer" who attended the meeting, the experts discussed at the meeting for a whole day, and the opinions were divergent, but they still failed to come up with a positive answer.
But the meeting still reflected some important information. For example, some experts cited China's supercomputer as an example. It has won first place in international competitions many times with the fastest computing speed.
However, according to the expert, American chips were used for the first six times (author's note: it should refer to the six consecutive championships of the "Tianhe-2" supercomputer, which used 80,000 Intel Xeons). After the U.S. Department of Commerce decided to ban the sale of related chips to four relevant Chinese units in April 2015, the "Shenwei·Taihuzhiguang" supercomputer developed in 2016 "equipped with nationally produced chips" (author's note: should be domestically produced CPUs) "Shenwei 26010". Does the so-called "carrying" refer to part of it?). Finally, he won the championship again in the international competition with a floating point calculation speed of 930 million times per second. Therefore, the expert said that the "ban on sales" is also a catalyst, giving researchers a sense of crisis, and to some extent, has accelerated the development of China's independent chips.
As everyone knows, the chip industry is an industry that requires a large amount of early capital and talent investment, and it is an industry with a relatively long return on investment cycle; it also needs to be passed down, generations of perseverance, hard work, and iterative and innovative accumulation can develop to today. The pinnacle.
Experts at the meeting pointed out that almost all of the world’s semiconductor industry giants started in the 1970s and 1980s, using a long time and a huge amount of talent investment in exchange for today’s technology accumulation. China’s semiconductor industry regrettably missed a golden age. After the reform and opening up, although we did not spend less time, we have also made world-renowned achievements in the field of low- and mid-range chips. However, the development of high-end chips depends on the market competition mechanism, and it is difficult to catch up with the level of the United States.
In the 1990s, some far-sighted scientists such as Ni Guangnan and others advocated independent core technology and proposed to target the main core chips of the United States (such as Intel's Xeon) to overcome the difficulties of high-end chip technology; and proposed that they are not afraid of repeated failures. , And will definitely win in the end.
However, some experts and economists believe that it is better to buy chips than to make chips, which is the so-called "market for technology" theory; and they don't worry that the United States will easily abandon China's huge market and huge profits. Some leaders who advocate market orientation are also scrupulous about large investments and high risks. This makes China's chip industry regretfully missed an opportunity again.
Recently, a Taiwanese media (China Times Electronic News) published an article entitled "Apocalypse on Cross-Strait Semiconductors", expressing a straightforward view on this issue. The main idea of the article is: Both sides of the strait attach great importance to the semiconductor industry, and the starting point is similar (at the same time, they introduced production lines from NEC in Japan and RCA in the United States respectively). The mainland government's support for semiconductors far exceeds that of Taiwan. Semiconductor technology is a knowledge that requires hard work and long-term focus. Cutting-edge technology research requires a high degree of professionalism of scientific and technological personnel. But now, in terms of manufacturing process and high-end integrated circuits, the mainland is indeed still inferior to Taiwan (?).
One of the reasons is that the young mainland scientific and technical personnel are all in state-owned enterprises, and they have no sense of crisis. Naturally, there is no sense of urgency, and I am afraid of hardship, so I don’t need to go and delve into the esoteric principles and key technologies. Some young people have poor professionalism and are keen to get rich as soon as possible. Some media have the habit of boasting, thinking that they are already No. 1 in the world. At the end of the article, it is pointed out that "humbly learning and asking, and long-term focus and concentration are the only ways to succeed." The arguments put forward in this article are still objective and worthy of our consideration.
Looking at the current chip problem from the perspective of weapons and equipment, I always feel that some experts and scholars lack an important factor in their consideration, which is "combat readiness." The Americans regard the chip as a kind of war preparation material. Every time we impose sanctions and bans on sales, we use the excuse "for national security." The grand strategy of the United States today is to contain China. Can it allow the Sino-US win-win situation to continue for a long time? This reminds us of the debate in my country in the 1980s on whether or not China should develop its own Beidou navigation system.
Some scholars oppose it, on the grounds that the world is using the US GPS, and the Beidou is expensive, and even if it is built, it will not be able to compete with the United States in the future. Furthermore, GPS cannot be turned off or encrypted, so that the United States itself cannot use it. However, in some local wars and military exercises in some countries after the 1990s, the United States turned off GPS-related functions and used encrypted interference, which proved that the opinions of the comrades who advocated the launch of Beidou were correct.
The reasons for the poor level of microelectronics technology and chips in the former Soviet Union and Russia are complicated. However, according to the Russian literature, there are three main reasons: First, the worldwide shift from electronic tubes to semiconductors in the 1960s. The former Soviet high-level officials believed that semiconductors were far less resistant to nuclear radiation than electron tubes, and tried their best to advocate the development of small electron tubes. This made the Soviet Union miss the golden opportunity from the beginning.
The second is that the Soviet Union has promoted the "ternary system" for a period of time (that is, +1, 0, -1 instead of the binary 1, 0), which is incompatible with the binary system generally promoted in the world, which wastes a lot of time and energy. The third is that the former Soviet Union distributed the microelectronics industry to the participating countries in order to balance the interests of the participating countries.
The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the fragmentation of the semiconductor industry. After a decade of economic shock, Russia has experienced slow economic recovery and is unable to fully regain its former glory. Therefore, if you make a directional error on core technical issues, the loss is often huge. Stones from other mountains can be used for jade, and these lessons have helped us avoid repeating the same mistakes.
Since the Ukraine crisis in 2014, Russia has experienced rounds of sanctions from the West, but it has been able to launch world-class new weapons one after another. For example, in air and space defense, the fifth-generation fighter Su-57 was put into production, the fourth-generation air defense system S-400 was in service, the fifth-generation air defense system S-500 successfully hit targets, and the new-generation strategic anti-missile system A-235 Combat duty and so on.
Western reporters exaggerated: Russia "frequently sends out chilling reminders!". Therefore, some readers questioned that Russia's basic industry level is poor, and microelectronics technology has always been Russia's shortcomings. Russia has launched these world-class new weapons, but it lacks world-class microelectronics technology and high-end chips. Russia also emphasizes that self-reliance basically does not use foreign components (the West also bans the sale of high-end electronic devices). How did Russian scientific and technical personnel solve this contradiction?
I once analyzed how Russia resolves this contradiction in the article "Why is there no chip crisis in Russia's cutting-edge weapons research and development?" In short, it is to rely on the idea of "independent innovation". To be more specific, one is to rely on the scientific and technical personnel's design philosophy of "strengthening strengths and avoiding weaknesses". Make full use of Russia's basic technical advantages in missile flight mechanics, inertial guidance technology and devices, engines, microwave electric vacuum technology, and analog circuits, and rely on the ingenuity of Russian scientific and technological personnel to make up for the lack of digital technology. This compensation is not a simple replacement, but an innovation.
As the author gave an example in the article "Chip Crisis", Russia uses a heterogeneous crystal oscillator as an intermediate frequency signal accumulation, and its volume is even smaller than that of an integrated circuit, which is a typical successful example. Russian scientific and technical personnel exploit their strengths and circumvent weaknesses, on the one hand out of helplessness, but on the other hand they have promoted new development and progress in analog circuit technology.
The second is to rely on the scientific and technical personnel's "system first" design philosophy. The latter refers to "the level of weapon components can be average, but the system level, including weapon system performance indicators and weapon reliability must be first-class." For example, in the field of aerospace defense weapons, from top Russian leaders to the chief designer of missile systems, they clearly realize that Russia’s basic industries are far inferior to those of the United States, and they should seek truth from facts to develop their own aerospace defense weapons.
They have two unwritten design guidelines:
One is that the weapon system cannot be required to surpass the United States in an all-round way, or to be the first in the world in all indicators. Russia does not have the strength to compete with the United States in an all-round way. Therefore, we must grasp the main indicators, solve the main contradictions, and make the main indicators lead the world.
Secondly, all equipment and components in the system cannot be required to be first-class, but independent innovation of each equipment is required to maximize its strengths and avoid weaknesses as much as possible. The main pursuit is effectiveness and stability, high reliability, and does not deliberately pursue the use of advanced components and advanced technology, do not care about the appearance of a bit "silly, big, rough". The chief divisions then synthesized a world-class air defense missile weapon system with outstanding main performance and level. This unwritten rule has been praised by some Western literature as the "golden rule" for Russia's weapon development.
The author thinks this is very enlightening to us. In the previous stage, my country's scientific and technological circles showed a certain impetuous mood, that is, all walks of life have to surpass the United States in an all-round way, and claimed that many aspects have already surpassed the United States. In fact, taking high-end chips as an example, it takes long-term hard work to catch up with the gap between us and the United States.
Even then, it is impossible to imagine that all high-end varieties of chips will catch up with the United States. In fact, as long as some major varieties catch up or approach the world-class level, it is very good. Of course, the core technology must be in our own hands. Weapon developers pursue world-class weapons, and he doesn't care whether the chips used are the world's first.
In order to innovate independently, we must have the spirit of innovation. For example, the design of the Russian S-300 system, their daring to innovate is still worthy of our reference. The first is band selection. The American Patriots use the C band. The Russian technicians proposed to use a higher X-band to further improve the performance of the radar. But there was a lot of risk at the time. It is not only difficult to develop and supply components.
The production of the key debugging equipment "X-band large antenna near field test system" required for phased array radar is also uncertain (it is required to install a test frame on a test stand of several meters).
When the sampling head moves in three dimensions at any point, the positioning accuracy is not more than one hundredth of the wavelength, that is, 0.3mm). But Russia dared to occupy this technological high point first, and was the first in the world to develop a large-scale X-band near-field test system.
In addition, with regard to the phased array radar antenna feed method, American scholars and engineering circles have always advocated the use of branch feed (via a large number of cables or waveguide branches), and negate the space feed. However, Russian scientific and technological personnel have made major breakthroughs and successes in space feeding. At an international radar conference at the beginning of this century, U.S. radar expert Baden listened to the report of Russian chief engineer Yevremov. When he knew that the space feed had been formally adopted on the S-300, he praised the Russian scientific and technical personnel. Innovative spirit and perseverance. And made such an interesting speech at the meeting:
Western phased array radar developers have been engrossed in branch feed design since 1960, and tend to ignore and reject this way of space feed. ……. By 1988, he thought that the space feed technology was not mature enough. ……. In 1993-1994, the detailed subject syllabus developed by IEEEE phased array antenna did not even mention the space feed array. This attitude of the Western radar engineering community left all the development of space feed array technology to the Russian engineers, allowing them to enter this blank space energetically.
Since Russia's basic scientific research is very solid, everyone believes that as long as Russia's economy improves further, its microelectronics technology and high-end chip technology will surely have new development and take off. Otherwise, low-level microelectronics technology may become a bottleneck for Russia's further development of informatization and networked weapons. Therefore, we learn from Russia's experience in the development of cutting-edge weapons, and mainly learn from other people's design ideas and spirit of independent innovation and daring to innovate, rather than imitating his specific methods.
The detours taken by core devices such as microwave tubes in my country also show that the road to “replace technology with the market” is unworkable.
In fact, the experience and lessons similar to this ZTE incident is not the first time. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the United States, the Soviet Union and other countries were making great efforts to develop a new generation of microwave high-power electronic tubes to equip a new generation of high-power radars, we emphasized the market economy and played the gongs and drums to turn off unprofitable electronic tubes. In factories and universities, electric vacuum majors that are not popular with students are closed (it is said that microwaves are harmful and electric vacuum materials are harmful).
Some experts worry that there will be no successors. A plausible concept has formed in some people's minds: electron tubes lag behind transistors, transistors lag behind integrated circuits, and integrated circuits lag behind chips. If you need it, you can spend money to buy it in foreign markets.
It wasn't until later that the West banned the sale of high-power microwave tubes to my country that it came to light. Russian scientific and technological personnel are smarter than us in this respect. Their microwave electric vacuum technology is very high and unique. They have played a major role in promoting the development of Russia's advanced weapons.
Every year in our country, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology organizes the "China Integrated Circuit Industry Promotion Conference". In 2016 and 2017, one of my students participated in the second session. After he returned, he conveyed to us the situation of the conference and the embarrassing situation of my country's chip industry. In 2017, the output value of my country's integrated circuit industry reached 500 billion yuan, accounting for about 11% of the global share, while my country's Taiwan accounted for 16%. Queued by operating income, there is no one in the mainland of the world’s top 20 semiconductor companies, while Taiwan has three shortlisted companies including TSMC.
my country’s annual imports of American semiconductor products, mainly high-end chips, amount to 230 billion U.S. dollars, which is comparable to our military’s one-year expenditure. Several US chip giants have made a lot of money in the Chinese market without exception, but over the years they have repeatedly used national security as a reason to wield the big stick of intellectual property rights. They will ban the sale of this one for a while and sanction it for a while. That company's purpose is to stifle my country's chip industry and keep the core technology in their hands forever.
The "chip incident" is certainly a bad thing, but it is also likely to become another golden opportunity for the development of my country's high-end chips. According to my students, at the second meeting, many scientific and technical personnel expressed that they wanted to work hard. There was also a group of returnees at the meeting, some of whom had been engaged in chip technology abroad for many years, and wanted to use their expertise to serve the motherland when they returned home. And also called on colleagues who are still abroad not to miss the opportunity. At the meeting, they also put forward the slogan "Patriotic scientists will work together and China Chip will soon rise".
In the final analysis, the science and technology battle is a talent battle. As long as the policy is right, talents are valued, and all the forces that can be united, I believe that China's high-end chips will soon rise.
