He took the title "Semiconductor -the Power of the World", and from "Semiconductor supports sustainable global economy", "Semiconductor Promoting Technology Sustainable Innovation", "Semiconductor and Computer Change Human Life", "Semiconductors help artificial intelligence to enhance human brains" "semiconductor Become a tool for changing the geopolitics of the world "and other aspects, analyzes the significance of semiconductors to the development of human society.

Semiconductor supports sustainable global economy

"Semiconductor is an important force to change the global economy," Professor Wei Shaojun cut in from GDP, an important indicator of economic development. He quoted the global GDP data released by the UN Statistics Department website, "From 1987 to 2021 There is an obvious "jump" that the average GDP data of the world has changed a lot. Before 2003, the growth of global GDP was relatively smooth. After 2003, GDP growth accelerated. "

It is understood that in the 16 years from 1987 to 2002, the global GDP average was US $ 27.8 trillion, and 19 years from 2003-2021, the global GDP average reached $ 6.92 trillion. The value of the following 19 years was 2.5 times the previous 16 years.

What kind of power has drove global GDP to grow so fast? Professor Wei Shaojun believes that it is based on Internet technology, mobile communication technology, and mobile Internet technology combined with the two to drive the growth of GDP worldwide.

In the past 20 years, the growth of information technology has also reflected some interesting phenomena: in 16 years from 1987-2002, the global information industry has achieved a total of US $ 17 trillion in sales, with an average of about 1.06 trillion US dollars per year; 2003- 2003- In 19 years in 2021, the global information industry achieved a total of US $ 7.69 trillion, with an average of $ 4.05 trillion per year. Looking at the average annual sales data of the global information industry, 19 years later were 3.8 times the first 16 years.

Of course, the information industry has a rapid growth trend as a whole, but there are special circumstances in the middle of some years, such as 2002 and the new crown epidemic. However, its overall development is basically in line with the situation of "the first 16 years (1987-2002) and the 19th year (2003-2021) the global information industry growth rate."

In addition, Professor Wei Shaojun also listed the global semiconductor industry sales data: In the 16 years of 1987-2002, the cumulative revenue of the global semiconductor industry was US $ 1643.1 billion, with an average of $ 102.7 billion per year. In the 19th year of 2003-2021, the cumulative revenue of the global semiconductor industry reached US $ 6.069.6 billion, with an average of US $ 319.5 billion per year, a 3.1 times the first 16 years.

Compared with global GDP development data and global information industry development data, it can infer that "the information industry has played an important role in global economic growth." Semiconductors are the core and foundation of the information industry, and the information industry supports the growth of global GDP. Therefore, semiconductors have played an important role in global economic development.

Further analyzes the correlation between semiconductor and global GDP. Most of the time, the correlation between the two is very strong, and many times this correlation probability will reach more than 90%. For most of the time, semiconductor growth, global GDP will also grow, semiconductor decreases, and global GDP will decline. This shows that semiconductor is not only a technology or one -type product, it also plays an important role in the growth of global economy.

Semiconductor promotes the continuous innovation of global science and technology

The Law of Moore has been driving the industry to develop in accordance with the laws of indexability. Now humans can integrate tens of billions of transistor on single silicon wafers. In such a highly complex system, it is definitely not a simple processing method. Since the birth of semiconductors, it is an innovative industry. If you only look at the semiconductor manufacturing link, it mainly faces three challenges:

The first is precision graphics, which is the optical carvings technology. According to the formula in the figure above, resolution = k1 * λ/na, resolution = coefficient x (the numerical pore diameter of the wavelength/projection lens of the light source). Due to the difficulty of changing the wavelength of the light source, the emergence of EUV and an immersed light carvings increased the numerical aperture (NA) of the aperture. The process of improvement of the resolution seems simple, but behind it is full of unexpected innovation.

The second is the innovation of new materials and new processes. At present, there are about 64 materials in the semiconductor field, including copper, cymbal, nickel, high K and other materials. Each material needs to go through thousands of process experiments. In the process of semiconductor manufacturing, how to form a whole set of really meaningful product processes? Without the innovation of these new materials and new processes, there will be no rapid improvement of semiconductor device performance.

The third is to improve the yield. The breakthrough of a single process may not guarantee the performance of the entire integrated circuit product significantly. In the process of process, a large number of statistical errors have been accumulated. Even if the yield of each step is as high as 99.9%, the final finished product rate is only 37%. Therefore, the logo of the level of industrial technology is not a breakthrough of a single technology, but a breakthrough of a complete product process.

Semiconductor and computer change human life

Computers are developing in two extreme directions: on the one hand, in the direction of supercomputers. Last year, the United States released cutting -edge supercomputers, and its computing power reached 18 of 10 per second. On the other hand, mobile phones are becoming an important computing device. In 1969, NASA's all computing power required to send astronauts to the moon is not enough to now have one -third of the computing power of a mobile phone.

Computing power is promoting the development of semiconductor, and semiconductors support the advancement of computer technology. Throughout the process, scientific computing in the early stage, to personal computing, mobile computing, cloud computing, and entering intelligent computing today, the computer and the semiconductor market are accompanied. In the future, we will enter a new era -the era of calculation. At that time, not people were using a computer, but that the computer was using a computer, which would become a major feature of the era of computing. In this development model, many things will change.

The computing power of high -performance computers has entered the E -Class era. E -Class hyper -computing refers to a supercomputer that can be performed by billions of mathematics per second. It is the commanding height of high -end information technology innovation and competition in the world. A crown in the super computer industry ". In the future, it will soon enter the Z -level era (1Z = 1021, 100 trillion levels). Since the speed of data growth is too fast, if the processing speed of the computer cannot keep up at any time, the computer cannot meet the requirements of development.

But from another aspect, there have been some things that have been disappearing in the past 40 years, such as electronic products, stamps, and cash, and many functions have been integrated on a mobile phone. Professor Wei Shaojun said, "Those things we have rushed have disappeared, and now a mobile phone can solve many problems. Such changes may be just the beginning, and future changes may be greater."

Semiconductor help AI to enhance human brain power

The impact of artificial intelligence is more profound. As early as the 1940s, the idea of artificial intelligence neural networks had already appeared. At that time, American neurologist Warren McCulloch and mathematician Walter Pits jointly conducted analogy and modeling of neurons in the brain, invented the artificial neural network. By the 1980s, Canadian neurologist David Hunter Hubel discovered the mechanism of visual nerves. These tasks have constituted the basis of artificial intelligence.

"Today we are repeating many of the previous work, and now the world is in the third round of intelligence." Professor Wei Shaojun said that the universal automatic computing device in 1946 was the first round of intelligent waves. Computing, data storage and retrieval capabilities; universal reasoning devices in the 1990s brought the second round of intelligent waves, using manual knowledge bases as logical judgments; machine learning devices starting in 2017 opened the third round of intelligent waves, Use machine learning algorithms to classify and identify.

In these three rounds of intelligent waves, the first two rounds are more understanding of concepts and nouns, but the third round of waves have changed a lot. In many ways, the machine has surpassed humans, such as the ImageNet project (ImageNet project (ImageNet project (IMAGNET project (IMAGNET project ( Image recognition) can use more than 20,000 objects of AI, AI voice recognition error rate has been reduced to 5.9%, and the accuracy of LipNet (automatic lip reading technology) is as high as 93.4%...

Semiconductors become geopolitical tools

"IROBOT's chairman and CEO Colin Angel said a word -'Observing how the whole society will treat artificial intelligence technology will be very interesting, this technology will undoubtedly be cool'. I think he said this sentence. It is very profound. 'Interesting' and 'cool' are both cool, but they are behind the profound impact on the development of AI. "Professor Wei Shaojun pointed out that the first industrial revolution has promoted the growth of human physical strength, that is, energy and power, that is, energy and power The ability to extend the limbs, and through the improvement of perception and sensory ability, the information revolution allows humans to see further and further. Today, the new intelligent revolution extend is brain power and cognitive ability.

Artificial intelligence cannot be separated from semiconductor, the combination of artificial intelligence and semiconductor, which will not only change human material society, but also change our cognitive ability. "But semiconductors have become a tool to change world geopolitics. This development process is really regrettable." On this basis, Professor Wei Shaojun also pointed out that the current global semiconductor market has been divided Being terminate. The semiconductor's "arms competition" has led to fragmentation of global semiconductor supply chain, which is also far -reaching for all mankind.

Even if the semiconductor globalization has been challenged, Professor Wei Shaojun still commented: "5G, artificial intelligence is promoting the advancement of integrated circuit technology and brings a lot of new content. Of course, the new content in turn supports 5G and AI as the in turn. The global economic development represents. So far, no other technology can replace integrated circuits. "

Article Source: International E -commerce