317: Chapter 316 Chip Testing

"Is this what General Manager Wang asked you to bring me?"

General Manager Yu Tongguang looked at the black box on the table and asked.

"Yes."

Liu Yemei nodded. "General Manager Wang specifically instructed that I must hand this to you in person."

General Manager Yu Tongguang reached out and touched the black box. A cold sensation came through, feeling like metal, yet also like plastic. He couldn't tell what kind of polymer material it was made of.

The box was small, only the size of a sheet of A4 paper, and had no combination lock, only two simple latches.

He opened the latches, reached out, and gently lifted the lid. A black Chip lay quietly in the center of the box.

The pure black plastic casing had no markings whatsoever; it looked like a generic, unbranded product from some obscure manufacturer.

This... was the Chip sample that Wang Shuo had spent a week creating?

It didn't seem any different from an ordinary Chip.

But there was no time to investigate that now; professional issues required professional personnel to handle them.

General Manager Yu Tongguang closed the box and looked up at Liu Yemei. Just as he opened his mouth, he saw that Liu Yemei had already stood up and said calmly, "I will go with you."

Slightly stunned, General Manager Yu Tongguang nodded. "Alright."

He turned and walked toward the elevator.

Under the respectful gaze of the receptionist, the two boarded the elevator and went straight to the third floor.

Upon exiting the elevator, Liu Yemei saw the large characters on the wall: Central Research Department.

After passing through the winding corridors and the office area, General Manager Yu Tongguang finally arrived in front of an office door.

He knocked on the door, and a voice came from inside: "Come in."

General Manager Yu Tongguang pushed the door open and entered.

The person inside was a man of about forty. Upon seeing General Manager Yu Tongguang, he immediately stood up and said, looking slightly embarrassed, "General Manager Yu, what brings you here?"

As he spoke, his gaze involuntarily drifted toward Liu Yemei behind General Manager Yu Tongguang, revealing a hint of amazement.

"Naturally, I have business."

General Manager Yu Tongguang did not stand on ceremony and said directly, "I need to test the performance of a Chip. Find someone capable to come and operate it."

Test a Chip?

The man looked surprised, then smiled. "Our Software Engineering Department may lack other things, but we have plenty of excellent engineers. I'll find one for you right now."

He took out his phone and dialed a number.

"Little Xu, come to my office for a moment."

After hanging up, the man introduced, "Little Xu is one of our veteran employees. He's honest, capable, and has a very strong sense of confidentiality."

General Manager Yu Tongguang nodded slightly.

A minute later, Xu Xiaofeng poked his head through the crack in the door.

"Director Huang, did you call for me?"

...

A dozen minutes later.

The group had arrived at the testing bench.

Huaneng Group headquarters did not have a manufacturing workshop, but how could such a massive headquarters be without professional testing equipment?

In fact, the equipment used for testing Chips at the Huaneng Group headquarters was extremely comprehensive, covering everything from physical performance to software performance tests. Furthermore, they could design different testing processes at any time based on different situations.

Due to the confidentiality of the Chip provided by Wang Shuo, and General Manager Yu Tongguang's desire to keep the news as contained as possible, there were few personnel involved in the testing. The huge testing area had been cleared, and only four people were on-site.

Apart from Xu Xiaofeng, who was operating the equipment, there was only General Manager Yu Tongguang, Liu Yemei, and Director Huang, who was helping out. That was it.

"General Manager Yu, Ms. Liu."

Director Huang looked at the busy Xu Xiaofeng and smiled as he introduced to the two, "Chip testing is an extremely complex task. Since the Chip is the culmination of modern electronics, its testing covers every aspect."

"Generally speaking, there are two main methods for testing a Chip. One is open testing, which involves peeling back the Chip's layers one by one to gradually test the internal circuits and examine the Chip's design structure. The other is closed testing, which mainly tests the Chip's physical performance and whether it achieves its design objectives."

"This second method is also very complex to operate. It is specifically divided into functional testing, parameter testing, curve testing, high-temperature cycling testing, high-temperature storage testing, drop-resistance testing, and so on..."

At this point, Director Huang looked at Xu Xiaofeng, who had already taken the Chip out of the black box, placed it on the test bench, and was aligning the probes with the pins. He continued, "Of course, per General Manager Yu's request, we won't be conducting the other test projects today; we will mainly focus on parameter testing."

"The first step is boundary scan."

Director Huang's expression was serious. "This is a very important step. We use the JTAG interface to scan the entire Chip's circuit to ensure its normal functionality. If the Chip has any defects, this step can directly detect the defect points."

Liu Yemei interrupted him. "Director Huang, if there is a defect in the Chip's circuit, what kind of abnormality will occur?"

"If there is a defect, the tester will display an abnormality, alerting us with striking red text, and will simultaneously display the location of the circuit defect..."

"Is it like this?"

Liu Yemei pointed to the screen in front of her.

Director Huang was immersed in the satisfaction of playing the teacher, and upon hearing this, he looked toward the screen in front of him.

At that look, he was immediately stunned.

On the screen in front of him, a line of striking red text appeared: Chip not detected.

What was going on?

He turned to look at Xu Xiaofeng beside him, only to see that he also looked completely bewildered.

He stepped forward himself and carefully checked the Chip pins and the probe connections. He didn't find any problems; the connections were secure, and the sequence was correct.

Unwilling to give up, Director Huang restarted the program. A moment later, the test results appeared, still in striking red text.

"This..."

Director Huang was bewildered.

General Manager Yu Tongguang turned his gaze to Liu Yemei.

Liu Yemei turned her head toward zero egg.

"Zero, how do we handle the Chip being unable to perform a boundary scan?"

"Please wait, requesting authorization."

"Authorization granted." Zero's voice was a gentle male voice. "Boundary scan requires configuring the JTAG pin interface. The Super Chip does not have such an interface standard, so it is normal that it cannot connect. Please proceed directly to the next test. Before that, Zero will install the underlying architecture code and the new instruction set runtime environment for the Super Chip at the system level for you."

"Please specify the installation device."

Director Huang looked at this zero egg that had answered the question, the corner of his mouth twitching slightly.

Damn it, why hadn't he thought of that?

Xu Xiaofeng's eyes brightened slightly. Why did he feel that this zero egg was smarter than his own? Was it due to permissions?

He knew that zero egg had permission levels.

He hadn't cared about it before, but now it seemed he would have to study it carefully when he got back.

Liu Yemei turned her gaze to General Manager Yu Tongguang. Installing a new system foundation required General Manager Yu Tongguang's approval.

General Manager Yu Tongguang did not refuse; in this situation, he had no choice but to agree.

Seeing General Manager Yu Tongguang nod, Liu Yemei took a small USB-like device out of her backpack and plugged it into the testing platform's interface.

That was the benefit of a universal interface; you could plug it in anywhere, no matter where you went.

"Wireless data interface detected. Establishing connection."

"Uploading request... Downloading data... Installing..."

"Installation complete. Debugging."

"Complete."

General Manager Yu Tongguang took a deep breath and said to Xu Xiaofeng, "Continue testing."

Xu Xiaofeng, who had been dazed, snapped back to reality and hurriedly walked to the testing platform to begin operating.

Director Huang watched Xu Xiaofeng working seriously, his penchant for playing the teacher stirring again.

Just as he was hesitating whether to speak, Liu Yemei asked, "Director Huang, are there any things to pay attention to regarding performance testing?"

"This..."

Director Huang turned his gaze toward General Manager Yu Tongguang. Seeing that he wasn't looking at him but was just staring at the screen, he said, "Different Chips have different focuses for performance requirements. For example, a CPU Chip used in a computer focuses on the Chip's running speed and multitasking ability. Although there are requirements for power consumption, it's not the primary concern; sometimes slightly higher power consumption is acceptable. However, mobile phone Chips are different."

Organizing his thoughts, Director Huang continued, "Mobile phone Chips are usually called SoC Chips, which means System on Chip. An SoC Chip contains over a dozen functional modules including CPU, GPU, NPU, ISP, and baseband. These modules are very important, but there is one crucial indicator that cannot be ignored: energy consumption."

"For a mobile phone, battery capacity is limited. It can't run while plugged in at any time like a computer, so while considering Chip performance, one must also consider power consumption issues. This means an SoC Chip must have trade-offs in its design; it cannot just blindly stack technology and performance."

"Of course, that's just from a professional perspective. Generally speaking, both still have commonalities. Their performance parameter data is roughly the same; they all reflect basic performance through clock frequency, number of cores, cache capacity, memory bandwidth, and video memory capacity and bandwidth. Beyond that, the rest is manufacturing process and energy consumption level."

"If you want to be more professional, sometimes we also test computer CPUs by calculating floating-point operation speed or integer operation speed, but such tests are generally not conducted on SoC Chips."

Liu Yemei listened very seriously and watched very seriously.

On the screen in front, the test progress was being displayed, with item after item of dazzling data. She couldn't understand it at all, but somehow, a woman's keenness made her notice that General Manager Yu Tongguang's breathing beside her was becoming heavy.

Feeling a bit confused but not thinking too deeply about it, she turned and asked, "Then how are standards set for this data? Benchmark scores?"

"Benchmark scores?"

Director Huang smiled and said, "That's just a way to fool laypeople. Can a single line of numbers evaluate the quality of a Chip? Standards are set by others. If everyone followed the same standard, that would be one thing—it would be relatively fair. But what if someone deviates from this standard?"

"Even if they don't exceed this standard, what if the judging panel changes the rules for specific contestants? For example, targeted optimization? For example, identifying the phone model or Chip model and then performing reverse optimization? There are too many tricks."

"Of course, I'm not saying benchmark scores are bad; I'm just saying that benchmark scores only have basic reference significance when based on the same standard."

Director Huang sighed, "None of the testing software currently on the market can achieve 100% accuracy and fairness. The only thing that can accurately evaluate is data that comes out of a laboratory, such as our Huaneng laboratory. At least here, we can ensure that everything is under a unified standard."

Liu Yemei nodded slightly. Listening to him, this seemed similar to the treacherous deceit in the business world.

Director Huang was still talking eloquently.

"Looking at the current universal technological level on the market, an SoC Chip should have a clock frequency that can reach over 2.2 GHz, a core count of over eight, a GPU core operation frequency that can reach over 1.0 GHz, an overall operation speed that can reach over 500 million operations per second, and achieve an excellent level in simultaneous multitasking and multi-threaded processing."

"To reach this standard, in our laboratory, the comprehensive benchmark score must be at least around 7000 points. Currently, only the Fruit phone's A13 enhanced version Chip has achieved this."

"Of course, the Kunlun 840 Chip we released not long ago isn't bad either; it's just a tiny bit worse than the Fruit A13 Chip."

Director Huang wore a smile on his face.

He was also one of the leaders for the Kunlun Chip, and achieving the current level was something to be proud of.

"A tiny bit worse, how much is that exactly?"

Liu Yemei asked.

"Ahem."

Director Huang coughed awkwardly, glanced at General Manager Yu Tongguang beside him, and whispered, "It's not much worse, just about 1600 points."

Seeing the strange expression on Liu Yemei's face, Director Huang hurriedly added, "But that's the comprehensive score. If we only discuss multi-core processing ability, we're only off by a little over a hundred points."

Liu Yemei raised an eyebrow and pointed to the screen.

"Then what about this one? How much is it off by?"

This?

Director Huang turned his head, puzzled. He saw that, at some point, the buzzing sound of the testing instrument had stopped, and General Manager Yu Tongguang and Xu Xiaofeng were both staring blankly at the screen.

What was wrong?

Director Huang turned to the screen, puzzled. The 15-inch screen was displaying the final results of the test.

But the moment he saw those two figures, it was as if someone had swung a hammer at his forehead; he froze on the spot.

The entire room was deathly silent.