Chapter 595: Temporary Technical Integration Center

Late February 1992

Saitama Prefecture, Omiya City.

In an industrial zone about a twenty-minute drive from Omiya Station, a quite expansive park was located.

Originally an old factory area under Odaiba Seiko, after several months of renovation and expansion by Saionji Construction, it now bore the sign “Saionji Semiconductor Business Temporary Technical Integration Center.”

Although the group had already planned a large-scale comprehensive semiconductor R&D and manufacturing base in Tsukuba Science City, Ibaraki Prefecture, the land leveling, ultrapure water and power supply supporting facilities, and even factory construction over there took time, and were definitely not things that could be completed overnight.

Over the past few months, whether it was the optical experts introduced from the former East German Zeiss system or the scientific researchers who had just been received and arrived in Japan not long ago from places like Saint Petersburg in the former Soviet Union, they had all arrived one after another.

Coupled with the group’s semiconductor materials, precision machinery, and process engineers originally scattered across various factories in Kanto, if everyone were kept scattered in their respective strongholds communicating via fax and phone, many urgent R&D projects needing advancement could simply not be launched.

Therefore, the Technical Committee temporarily transformed this former Odaiba Seiko factory area in Omiya, which had convenient transportation and good factory foundations, into a transitional technical integration base.

Nearly a hundred researchers from Germany, the former Soviet Union, and native Japan were centrally accommodated here.

To take care of those foreign scholars who had come from afar, the group not only equipped the residential buildings next to the park with Russian, German, and English translators, but also specially invited chefs to the cafeteria who could make German sausages, black bread, and Russian borscht.

After the initial few weeks of adjustment, this group of experts from different countries finally gradually adapted to the pace of life in Japan and began to get used to the R&D system within Saionji Group that highly relied on data sharing.

During this recent period, Emi Suzuki immersed herself in Omiya almost every day.

As the chief technical consultant of the group, she was stationed here, responsible for coordinating the docking between this batch of overseas experts and Saionji’s existing R&D system, while integrating the technical standards, experimental equipment, and phased results in everyone’s hands into the same framework.

At 10:30 AM, in the office on the third floor of the No. 2 R&D Building.

“Incorrect, Mr. Lange, the parameters here cannot directly apply Jena’s previous standards.”

Standing in front of the whiteboard, Emi held a black marker, her eyes behind her round-framed glasses intently staring at the two comparison tables spread out before her.

Opposite the desk, former East Germany optical expert Peter Lange and a coating scholar who had just come from Leningrad were each holding thick notebooks, their brows tightly furrowed.

“Look, everyone, this is the actual measured feedback data run by the 248-nanometer excimer laser experimental device over at Odaiba.”

Emi turned around, rapidly writing down a few lines of formulas on the whiteboard, and circled one of the correction terms with the marker.

“If calculated according to Germany’s original lens tolerance system, plus the multilayer film reflectance curve provided by Professor Sokolov’s team, once on our existing experimental machine table, the edge wavefront aberration will exceed the compensation upper limit of the self-calibration model.”

She tapped the numbers on the whiteboard and explained in fluent English:

“So we don’t need you to modify the coating formula from scratch; you just need to uniformly replace the third set of inspection benchmarks with Saionji’s internal data format. As long as this part of the interface matches, the remaining error correction can be directly handed over to Odaiba’s ‘Jade Box’ to calculate.”

Lange lowered his head and stared at that set of formulas for quite a while, then turned his head and whispered a few words with the Soviet counterpart next to him in English mixed with German words.

A moment later, the two fifty-something scholars simultaneously showed expressions of sudden realization.

“I see… Transferring part of the pressure of mechanical and optical tolerances into the front-end calculation model?”

Lange pushed his glasses, his tone carrying a hint of amazement.

“If so, we can re-export a version of test parameters this afternoon.”

“Then I will trouble the two of you.”

Emi closed the cap of the marker and nodded with seasoned maturity.

After the two foreign experts left with their materials, she breathed a slight sigh of relief, picked up the mug on the desk, and took a sip of the coffee that had already gone somewhat lukewarm.

However, before she even had time to sit down and rest for a while, the office door was knocked on again.

“Miss Emi.”

A young Japanese engineer poked his head in, holding a stack of equipment lists with a wry smile on his face.

“Over at Workshop No. 2, the two veteran masters in charge of precision machining and wafer inspection are urging again. They said the interface modification part for the interferometer shipped from Germany hasn’t been signed and confirmed yet, and asked when you will have time to go over and take a look.”

“Tell them I’ll go down in ten minutes.”

While answering, Emi lowered her head to cross off the just-completed project on her schedule book on the desk, and casually stuffed two pending process conversion standards into a folder.

A year ago, if she had been left alone to face so many eccentric top scholars from various countries whose resumes were older than her age, she would probably have been so nervous just speaking that her palms would sweat.

After all, casually picking anyone here meant someone who had spent twenty or thirty years immersed in their respective fields.

But after truly taking over this job, Emi found that things seemed much smoother than she had imagined.

Just as Satsuki had told her on the plane back then—she didn’t need to understand every subdivided field better than these experts.

People doing optical coatings might not understand servo control, and people doing precision machinery might not understand the underlying logic of computational lithography.

And what she needed to do was simply stand at the very center of the entire system, understand what shape each person’s puzzle piece was in their hands, and then tell them which two edges they should piece together.

What’s more, whenever these experts from different countries brought out their respective trump-card ideas to collide, it could often spark many novel ideas she had never seen in papers before.

This feeling of weaving countless scattered wisdom bit by bit into a complete system even made her feel somewhat addicted.

Of course, it would be even better if they didn’t always quarrel over equipment arrangements.

Just as Emi picked up her clipboard and prepared to head out to Workshop No. 2, the secretary at the door suddenly walked over briskly.

“Miss Emi, please wait a moment.”

“What’s wrong? If it’s the purity report for that batch of Takada Quartz samples, just put it on my desk.”

Emi organized the forms in her hand without even raising her head.

“It’s not the report.”

The secretary’s expression looked somewhat subtle, and her voice lowered a bit.

“Notification was just received from the guard post that a guest is visiting today and has already entered the park.”

“A guest?”

Emi was stunned and subconsciously frowned.

“Are there technical representatives from external partner manufacturers scheduled to visit this morning? I remember the people from Sumitomo Chemical scheduled for tomorrow afternoon…”

Muttering to herself, she walked along the corridor toward the stairwell.

As a result, just as she turned the corner of the first-floor lobby, she saw a few familiar figures walking in from outside the automatic doors.

The young girl walking at the very front wore a beige long trench coat, her long black hair hanging down her shoulders smoothly, followed half a step behind by the calm-looking Chizuru Matsushiro.

The late winter sunlight shone obliquely in through the lobby glass doors, landing right on the young girl’s face carrying a faint smile.

Emi’s footsteps slammed to a halt in place.

The clipboard almost slipped from her arms.

At that instant, she almost instinctively wanted to cry out “Satsuki-chan,” and then pounce directly over like she usually did.

However, the words had already welled up to her throat, when her peripheral vision suddenly caught the base administrative director respectfully bowing nearby, and a few young researchers holding drawings stopping their steps and looking over from across the corridor.

No.

This is a workplace!

She is now the highest technical person in charge ruling over the entire Omiya base!

If she pounced into Miss Saionji’s arms like an elementary schooler to act spoiled in front of so many subordinates and foreign experts, wouldn’t the dignity she had painstakingly built up over these past few weeks shatter completely on the spot?!

In a flash, Emi abruptly stopped her forward-stepping feet.

But the wild joy already appearing on her face wasn’t so easy to pull back.

Thus, pulled by two completely opposite impulses, Emi’s mouth twitched quite unnaturally several times, and finally, she forced out a bizarre smile on her small round-framed-glasses-wearing face—a smile that wanted to put on airs while completely unable to suppress the joy deep in her eyes.

“Mi—Miss Saionji, welcome… to guide our work.”

That voice was tightly strung, sounding almost like she was reciting some stiff welcome speech.

Satsuki looked at her expression where her facial muscles were practically about to knot up, and almost couldn’t help laughing out loud on the spot.

She blinked, smiled slightly, and very cooperatively nodded slightly:

“Well, Consultant Suzuki, thank you for your hard work.”

Without disturbing too many people, Satsuki rejected the formal welcome party prepared by the base administration department, and only had Emi accompany her for a casual walk around the park.

Although the exterior of the renovated old factory area still retained some simplicity of 1970s and 1980s industrial architecture, the interior had long been replaced with brand-new constant-temperature ventilation pipelines and earthquake-resistant foundations.

When passing through the enclosed corridor connecting the two factory buildings, through the observation windows on both sides, the busy scenes in different laboratories could be clearly seen.

“Currently, Building No. 1 is mainly for materials and chemical analysis, while Building No. 2 is the optical component testing and precision machinery platform.”

Once entering familiar work content, Emi quickly regained her usual professional state, holding her folder and walking half a step beside Satsuki, introducing clearly:

“Space over at Odaiba is limited, so we moved all assembly testing requiring larger venues to Omiya. Once the first-phase pilot plant building over at Tsukuba is built, the entire set of equipment and personnel here can be directly moved over module by module.”

As the two were talking, the soundproof door of an optical laboratory ahead was pushed open by someone from inside.

“Incorrect, Mr. Sokolov, you cannot directly use mechanical shims to correct that 0.5-microradian tilt angle like in the Soviet Union; heat transfer will become completely asymmetrical during continuous exposure!”

Accompanied by English with a thick German accent, Klaus Weber, wearing a white lab coat, walked out while gesturing on the blueprint with the pencil in his hand.

Beside him, a stocky, white-haired former Soviet old scholar was waving his arms with a flushed face and glaring eyes:

“Klaus, when I was adjusting the reflector mount for the space telescope in Leningrad, your temperature control compensation didn’t even exist yet! As long as two sets of piezoelectric ceramic fine-tuning rings are added to the base, thermal drift can be completely offset within three milliseconds!”

“This is for chip lithography, not launching a reconnaissance satellite into the sky that will only be used for a few years!”

Weber retorted without giving an inch.

“The wafer stage has to continuously and reciprocate at high speed tens of thousands of times a day; can your piezoelectric ring’s lifespan survive three months?”

The two argued with flushed faces, neither yielding to the other, until they walked a few steps out of the door and suddenly noticed the people standing in the corridor.

Weber froze for a moment, quickly stopped the argument, took off his glasses, and bowed to Satsuki:

“Miss Saionji, why are you here?”

Sokolov beside him also reacted, somewhat awkwardly tidying his collar, and followed up with a greeting in stiff English.

This optical machinery authority who had just arrived in Japan last month obviously did not expect to directly run into the group’s supreme helm in the corridor.

“I’m just here to take a look, you two don’t need to be constrained.”

Satsuki smiled gently, her gaze pausing for a moment on the blueprint covered with red and blue marks in the two men’s hands.

“It seems Dr. Weber and Professor Sokolov are getting along quite harmoniously.”

Weber’s old face flushed slightly, and he gave a light cough: “We are just discussing the fine-tuning scheme for the fixing mount… Professor Sokolov’s experience in dual-stage servo structures is indeed very rich and gave us a lot of inspiration, but some process habits still need to be unified.”

“It’s fine, just discuss slowly. If you need any new test parts, directly have Emi sign off.”

Satsuki didn’t disturb their research too much, and after a few pleasantries, she took Emi and continued walking forward.

Looking all the way along the corridor, similar scenes were visible almost everywhere.

In the preparation area outside the cleanroom, a few senior packaging technicians who originally belonged to a native Japanese electronics factory were swarming around an inspection instrument imported from the United States, gesturing and cross-checking data with a young Soviet applied chemistry scholar; on the whiteboard in the rest area not far away, abbreviations in German, Russian, Japanese, and English were mixed together, with a string of circuit and optical path sketches that only engineers could understand drawn underneath.

Satsuki slowed her pace and quietly watched for a while.

Over these years, from secretly contacting Weber’s team on the eve of the East Germany upheaval, to absorbing native technical backbones taking advantage of the bursting of Japan’s economic bubble, down to closely eyeing Saint Petersburg’s list in the cold winter of the Soviet Union’s dissolution…

Those nets cast out back then, the talents painstakingly gathered from all over the world, finally sat in the same room today, sparking real, tangible sparks around the same goal.

Of course, bringing so many top brilliant minds together, trouble was definitely indispensable.

When passing a corner where there were no other people around, Emi, who had been maintaining a serious little face all along, finally dropped her shoulders and couldn’t help pouring out her grievances to Satsuki in a low voice:

“Satsuki-chan, you saw it just now too, right? I’m telling you, Dr. Weber and Professor Sokolov’s two groups have been arguing at regular meetings for a full four days just over the usage time of Machine No. 3!”

Counting on her fingers with a headache-inducing expression, she recounted:

“Over on the Germany side, they insisted on keeping the ambient humidity stable within 0.5 percentage points before being willing to boot up, while the Soviet side was in a rush to test the response speed of the newly modified servo motor, and yesterday they even almost made me go act as a referee for them over who gets to use the laser light source first.”

“Clearly both sides are old veterans yet acting like children! I coaxed this side then coaxed that side, my lips are almost worn out!”

Hearing this, Satsuki paused slightly in her steps, turned her head, and looked at her with a half-smile:

“Oh? Truly rare.”

“What is it?”

Emi blinked uncomprehendingly.

“I remember when we were in the Odaiba underground laboratory before, someone quarreled with Mr. Shimomura from morning till night every week just to grab the computing nodes and power supply quota of the ‘Jade Box,’ right?”

Satsuki extended a finger and gently tapped the tip of her nose.

“Emi, who usually loves to argue endlessly with Mr. Shimomura, would actually find other people quarreling troublesome?”

Emi’s face flushed to the roots of her ears instantly.

Looking left and right and seeing no one in the corridor, she lowered her voice somewhat shyly and annoyed to defend herself:

“Th—that’s different! I argued with Mr. Shimomura because his scheduling algorithm took up too much redundant bandwidth to begin with! That’s called rigorous academic discussion! Unlike this bunch of old men, who can argue for twenty minutes over whether a torque wrench should be placed according to German standards or Soviet standards!”

“Yes, yes, yes, what you do is called academic discussion, and what others do is called chicanery.”

Satsuki smiled and nodded along with her words.

“Hey! Satsuki-chan, you’re biased!”

Emi pouted her cheeks in dissatisfaction, and that “chief consultant” air she had put on all morning vanished without a trace amidst the banter.