Chapter 289 - 289: What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Stronger

Faced with the massive capital pullout from the semiconductor, precision instrument, and petrochemical refining sectors orchestrated by Europe and America.

Li Gu Ming, the newly appointed General Manager of the Xingdao Branch, along with Deputy General Managers Yang Fan (in charge of internal affairs) and Zhang Wei (in charge of economic affairs), quickly held an internal meeting.

The details of the meeting were completely unknown to the outside world.

But that same evening, a portion of the semiconductor, petrochemical refining, and precision instrument companies controlled by Xing Island itself were directly merged into six major groups: Xingdao Semiconductor, Nanyang Electronics, Xingdao Petroleum, Nanyang Petrochemical, Xingdao Instruments, and Nanyang Equipment.

Homo Sapiens Company then secretly initiated other preparations. For example, it began the process of merging the shell companies it indirectly controlled in Malaysia, Java, and Divine Island to establish official, fully-fledged local branches.

After all, American intelligence agencies had already guessed that something was amiss in Malaysia and Java, so Homo Sapiens Company decided to drop the pretense.

The operational scope of the newly established Xingdao Branch included the Riau Islands and Johor from Malaysia.

The rest of Malaysia on the Malay Peninsula was combined with Sumatra Island, falling under the purview of the Malacca Branch.

Malaysia's Northern Borneo was combined with Java's Southern Borneo—that is, the entire island of Borneo—to form the new Borneo Branch.

The island of Java itself, along with the Lesser Sunda Islands and surrounding areas, was assigned to the Java Branch.

Sulawesi Island, the Lu Gu Islands, and half of Irian Island were assigned to the Spice Islands Branch.

Homo Sapiens Company's complete list of First-Tier Regional Branches was: the Luzon Branch, Siam Branch, Hongsawaddy Branch, Ceylon Branch (including Diego Garcia Island), Malacca Branch, Borneo Branch, Java Branch, Spice Islands Branch, and the Assam Branch, which was not yet scheduled to be publicly announced.

In addition, there were the special branches directly under the head office: the Xingdao Special Branch, Yangon Special Branch, Manila Special Branch, and Divine Island Special Branch.

Currently, the internal structure of Homo Sapiens Company, from top to bottom, consisted of the Head Office, Regional Branches, First-Tier Regional Branches (including Special City Branches), Second-Tier City Branches, and subsidiaries directly under the Head Office.

For example, a Regional Branch would be the Southeast Asia Regional Branch; a First-Tier Regional Branch would be the Luzon Branch; a Second-Tier City Branch would be the Dongzhi City Branch.

The combined operational area of these First-Tier Regional Branches spanned 4.18 million square kilometers, with a total of 620 million employees. This workforce included 38.73 million New Humans, 2.71 million Soldier-type employees, and the remainder were natural-born humans.

This scale was enough to overwhelm the vast majority of global powers.

After all, New Human employees could use bio-chips to rapidly master a wide range of knowledge and skills. It took only a few months to fast-track the training of an average talented individual.

...

The industrial war launched by European and American capital caused Homo Sapiens Company to lose many import and export channels. Its semiconductor business, in particular, was nearly destroyed in an instant.

However, for Homo Sapiens Company, this blow was ultimately useless.

Xingdao Semiconductor Group.

The Xingdao Semiconductor Group quickly began recruiting employees laid off by European and American firms, Samsung, and TSMC. In Johor, a dedicated city had long been prepared to rapidly accommodate the group's new factories.

Zhang Kai had been surviving on relief meals for three days when, early one morning, he received a notice from the company telling him to go to Chip City.

He boarded a ferry with several of his colleagues.

Not far off, the massive dredging vessel *Sea Plough* was still at work, deepening the shipping lanes of the Malacca Strait.

"Does Johor even have a semiconductor industry?" an old colleague asked, looking completely baffled.

"I guess they're setting one up now!"

"So what are we going to do there? Surely they don't expect us to help with construction?"

When they arrived at the small port town, a dozen large buses were already waiting.

Half an hour later, they reached a small city 33 kilometers from Xing Island. Its previous name had been wiped from the records, and its existing workforce had been rapidly retrained as specialized personnel to support the new semiconductor industry.

Chip City wasn't massive—it could house about 100,000 employees—and its factories had all undergone adaptive retrofitting in a matter of days.

A former rubber pillow factory, for instance, had been converted into a semiconductor packaging and testing facility, complete with a state-of-the-art cleanroom, in just four days.

Thanks to the experience gained from building a series of underground cities, Homo Sapiens Company already possessed mature, rapid construction methods for cleanrooms. They had no need to hire foreign firms for design or construction.

Homo Sapiens Company had its own internal departments for semiconductor and chip R&D and manufacturing. After all, even their bio-chips required further development and modification.

Homo Sapiens Company had no intention of selling its bio-chips to the public. To that end, it had long ago established a separate chip R&D department dedicated to researching the production of products similar to conventional electronic chips.

Now was the time to put those results to use.

Zhang Kai entered the office. His workshop leader, a man named Wilson, looked over the 24 people gathered there.

"Let me introduce myself. My name is Wilson, but you can also call me Wang Qianxun. I'm from the Luzon Branch, and I'll be your team leader for this packaging and testing workshop. I know you all have experience in this field from other semiconductor companies, but our processes are a little different, so you'll need some time to get familiar with them."

He quickly divided them into six teams. For industries requiring around-the-clock production, the company typically organized its workforce into six to eight shifts.

Zhang Kai was placed on a team with three people he didn't know very well.

After changing in the locker room, they entered a gowning room where they put on specialized protective suits.

Only then did they enter the packaging and testing workshop itself.

The entire workshop was, in fact, fully automated. The employees' jobs consisted mainly of manual spot-checks, monitoring the production line's status, and coordinating with other workshops and the central production control office.

The various chips produced in the adjacent factory were delivered here to the packaging and testing facility through an underground clean-channel.

Zhang Kai's workshop was responsible for packaging and testing the "No. 14 General-Purpose Chip," an automotive computer chip.

'What kind of chip is this?' Zhang Kai stared at the data on the display. 'Its processing power is 200 TOPS?'

He knew that Apple's latest A14 processor, built on TSMC's 5-nanometer process, contained tens of billions of transistors, yet its peak processing power was only 11 TOPS.

Various test metrics flickered across the computer screen.

This 2x2 centimeter chip used a 100-nanometer process and contained only 200 million transistors, yet its processing power reached an astonishing 200 TOPS.

To surpass the A14 despite a 20-fold larger process size and a 50-fold lower transistor density... the fundamental reason for this was a difference in core technology.

Intel, TSMC, and Samsung all produce electronic chips.

Homo Sapiens Company, however, used optoelectronic composite chips, where all the transistors were photonic.

A single one of their transistors could function as 16 different optical switches. The core of this technology was an organic photosensitive compound isolated from light-sensitive cells.

When irradiated with ultraviolet light in the 30 to 150-nanometer wavelength range, this compound generates discrete levels of potential difference, which it can temporarily maintain. A separate pulse of 33-nanometer UV light can then erase this potential difference.

This meant the photonic chip operated not in a traditional binary (base-2) system, but in a hexadecimal (base-16) one.

Photons travel faster than electrons. Furthermore, a single photonic channel can carry a composite beam of photons. Combined with a switch capable of 16 different states, this means photonic chips are incredibly fast and have a massive information storage capacity.

Moreover, since photons are bosons, unlike electrons which are fermions, their operational energy consumption is extremely low.

This 200 TOPS chip consumed only about 3.2% of the energy of an Apple A14.

The only complication was that Homo Sapiens Company had no intention of making its technology compatible with existing binary electronic chips. Instead, it was going all-in on its new hexadecimal architecture.

For Europe and America to think they could suppress Homo Sapiens Company by creating a chokehold in the semiconductor industry was nothing but wishful thinking.

Having long prepared for this moment, Homo Sapiens Company was now rolling out its own optoelectronic chips for full-scale commercialization.

As for its even more advanced bio-chips, Homo Sapiens Company had no plans to release them to the market, keeping them for internal use only.