Chapter 276 - 269: Qilin 955_1

The two "stars" of the Star of Asia project were unaware that the polar bear was preparing a tasty bait for them, but the European Space Agency had willingly taken the bait from the Aerospace Development Committee.

In Capital, the chief engineers from the Aerospace Administration and New Yuan had received the basic design diagrams of the European Space Agency’s HVE rocket and the launch trajectory, and were discussing them together on the spot.

The engineers sent by the European Space Agency (mainly from Italy and France) modestly listened to the opinions from the East.

In space technology, Europe could claim to have its own unique and excellent technologies, but when it came to rockets, there was not much to boast about.

Previously, Ariane 5 could have been boasted about, but then it got rubbed into the ground by the CZ-10. Even if the latter had some issues with its maiden flight, they were not fatal, and it was still a powerful heavy-lift rocket. New Yuan was even less subject to discussion.

Looking at the basic blueprint of the HVE rocket, Androff carefully evaluated the European Space Agency’s (French) data on the 5.2-meter diameter rocket body and EAP boosters, and, under the expectant gaze of the European experts, slowly nodded.

"The basic design of the HVE is fine, and the materials of the rocket body are also good," he said.

But before the European Space Agency could be pleased, Androff made a turn:

"However, the four solid rocket boosters are too expensive, and the vibration is relatively high. It would be better to change to two boosters, to connect more boosters in series on the EAP, raising the single thrust to between 1200 to 1400 tons, which is the level of the Space Shuttle’s SRB. Are there any technical difficulties with this?"

Upon hearing this, the European Space Agency experts looked towards Simon of CNES (France space agency), who had deeply participated in the development of the Ariane 5 rocket and was the chief engineer of the HVE.

Simon was naturally familiar with EAP and quickly gave an answer:

"No problem, perhaps the combustion chamber needs to be reinforced, but there is plenty of time. We can complete the manufacturing of the new EAP by 2017."

Androff asked, "Then I have nothing more to say. Are you really deciding to develop the engines for the second and third stages on your own?"

Simon replied, "The engines for the second and third stages only require minor modifications to the ’Vulcan 2’. We believe it’s very reliable."

Over at the Aerospace Administration, Chief Engineer Yun Hongjun of the CZ-10 also offered his opinion:

"Unlike the SLS, although the HVE also uses hybrid solid-liquid propulsion, the HVE’s Core Stage One uses kerosene and has very strong thrust. If you want to accommodate both the individual launch of VV-1 (Veneto One) and the assembly of the HVE, the burn time of the first stage needs to be considered as a compromise, keeping the dead weight within an appropriate range."

The estimated takeoff weight of HVE was between 2300 to 2500 tons, a truly gigantic rocket. The European Space Agency humbly and smoothly accepted the suggestions from the Aerospace Development Committee and made small modifications to the design.

Androff said, "Since VV-1 has already been approved, you can prepare to ship the 2 K400 engines and the 16 YF100V engines. These engines will be shipped in December. What do you think?"

Saur replied, "No, in air freight. We can’t wait to have them in place. Can your engineers also arrive a bit quicker? Your ADC is the part of the Selene project that can be completed the fastest. We plan to finish the design of the first stage of the VV within six months. Please customize a reliable recovery system as soon as possible."

Androff assured, "If maintenance and refurbishment follow the procedure, we guarantee a fault-free recovery for 20 times. If there are any problems, we will provide appropriate compensation."

Simon expressed his gratitude, "Thank you, then let’s sign the contract as soon as possible. I can’t wait to send the HVE to space."

Androff added, "Wait, are any of you interested in purchasing heat shield tiles for the space shuttle, the kind that can be reused five times?"

The experts from the European Space Agency: "..."

Simon looked towards his colleagues, the Italian and French representatives of the European Space Agency. With some reluctance, they said:

"Custom-made... Will there be a charge?"

...

Huawei Laboratory.

Yu Chendong picked up a black integrated SOC, with the silk-screen SMIC on it, a chip manufactured and packaged by SinoCore International, marked 65H4, meaning it was the fourth iteration of the 28nm process made by multiple exposures with a 65nm photolithography machine.

This was the first Kirin SOC to use New Yuan’s EDA software, the HiSilicon Kirin959 processor.

After solving 97 key problems, under the leadership of the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense, the national semiconductor industry began to charge towards ternary computing.

The 97 problems solved included producing 28nm chips with acceptable yield rates using immersion multi-exposure for 65nm and 45nm photolithography machines, and at the same time, it supported the establishment of a good production line for 28nm chips, with costs only about 5% to 7% higher than those of TSMC.

A more professional new generation of 28nm photolithography machines was being developed at an accelerated pace, and it was expected that the new generation of photolithography machines would be completed at the beginning of 2018.

At the same time, companies like Unigroup, ZTE, Wuhan Digital Technology Institute, and HuaKe Longxin were conducting related processor development work. After discussion, Huawei, which had completed equity reform, was also brought into the fold, becoming one of the first private enterprises to develop ternary mobile processors.

Upon learning that the country possessed such powerful reserves of ternary technology, Huawei immediately invested heavily, starting to digest the ternary circuit design concepts and underlying architectural design provided by New Yuan.

After discussion, the executives believed that the nation would inevitably strive to promote ternary chips and their ecosystem, and requested that the HiSilicon laboratory produce a ternary chip as soon as possible. They also began to compile the X Language system from the ground up.

The operating system was actually quite simple. During a summit meeting, Yellow River Semiconductor indicated that New Yuan’s XOS would be open to the public, not closed like IOS, hoping through a fresh start to unify mobile and desktop systems.

That is to say, in the future, the prevalent mobile-computer systems would be consistent and seamlessly switchable. Taking advantage of the clean slate, Yellow River Semiconductor thus proposed that manufacturers start standardization from then on, which went quite smoothly.

Huawei found that although XOS was indeed quite rudimentary and lacked software, its underlying architecture was unexpectedly refined, almost able to just apply a user interface like Google’s Android and be usable. The main focus was still on developing the software ecosystem.

For the core device, the SOC, HiSilicon Kirin didn’t start from scratch. To reduce design time, they transported the design of the Kirin950 octa-core processor, then optimized and improved it according to the characteristics of ternary circuits.

The Kirin950 had about 3 billion transistors internally. After being converted to ternary for the Kirin959, the equivalent number of field-effect transistors dropped to about 2 billion, but comprehensive performance increased by 15%, nearly jumping a generation ahead and surpassing the current market’s most powerful processor, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820.

Naturally, the Kirin959 was paired with new ternary RAM and ROM. Although using diodes to simulate field-effect transistors expanded the space of a single basic unit of a ternary chip, resulting in a decreased number of basic components, the ternary state could represent many more status combinations, which made the same ternary chips much more efficient.

In ternary computing, a byte is composed of 9 ternary bits, as opposed to the 8 bits of a binary byte.

Thus, a ternary byte can store 19,683 states, rather than the 256 states of a binary byte, which is roughly 76 times the length of a binary byte!

This is enough to store common Chinese characters as well as many rare characters, as people generally use only about 3,000 Chinese characters.

And there were differences in units as well:

Westerners prefer to use 1000 as a division, whereas binary computers dictate 1KB = 2^10 (or 1024) B, but manufacturers use 1KB = 1000B. This is why the storage manufacturers advertise as 1GB would appear to be only 931MB to a binary computer, and why the usable space of a 1000G hard drive you buy is only 931GB.

In ternary computers, New Yuan has defined 1KB = 1000B, 1MB = 1000KB, 1GB = 1000MB.

If simply converting based on storage state capacity, 1B (ternary) = 76.8867B (binary).

Of course, in practice that doesn’t work, and by definition, one byte in ternary and one byte in binary can only store one number or English letter (or Chinese character), so for the most part, the usage remains the same as before, but still significantly reduces the file size occupied.

This is particularly advantageous for the Chinese internet, as under binary, 2 bytes of 8 bits are needed to store one Chinese character, whereas one 9 bit ternary byte is enough.

Huawei’s next flagship model was decided to be directly named Mate10, equipped with the Kirin959 processor and 9+162GB of memory and storage space. ZTE and Unigroup’s chips were also hot on its heels, and Yu Chendong was determined to compete for this first place.