On November 28, Zhang Rujing appeared in Haikou, his new identity is the founder and general consultant of Hainan Hangxin High-tech Industrial Park project. In an article titled "Hainan: Laying out the" core "industry to cultivate the" core "kinetic energy" on the same day, Zhang Rujing quoted a sentence: "Automotive chips, aviation chips, etc. are almost produced in the whole machine factory, but there are few domestic, so we put forward the concept of CIDM."
The "CIDM", or Collaborative integrated circuit manufacturing (CIDM, Commune IDM), is both a mode of operation in the semiconductor industry and a mode that Rujing believes is "best for China".
In the past, Fabless only did research and development and design, outsourcing production to Foundry such as SMIC and TSMC. IDM is for vertical integration, the threshold is high, the design and production are done, and the profit is therefore higher than that of only a single link, Samsung and Texas Instruments are this model.
On the one hand, the CIDM model of Zhang Rujing's mouth can share talents and other resources through the way of a large number of chip design companies. On the other hand, because the CIDM model is customer-oriented, it can reasonably plan its own production capacity according to the actual needs of the design company, which is more flexible and less risky. In Mr Chang's own words: "The advantage of CIDM is that it is owned by everyone. Resources are shared, risks are shared, synergies are greatly increased, and there are many benefits."
The first time this idea was put into practice was in 2018, when Rujing Chang quit his job at Xinsheng Semiconductor Technology in Shanghai to set up China's first CIDM company, Xinen.
But he didn't stop there. Four years later, at the age of 74, Chang left Xinen and joined Juta Semiconductor. The semiconductor company, which was founded in 2017, just got a huge financing of 13.5 billion yuan three months ago, and the valuation has reached 30 billion yuan at that time.
As executive director and Dean of Jita College, Zhang Rujing, as he did every time he started a business in the past, publicly stood for this company, told the external challenges faced by China's semiconductor industry, took the time to explain "what is CIDM", and shouted "integrity, innovation, excellence" and other values. It's the training that stayed with him, all the way from Texas Instruments, and it's an indelible mark on an idealist.
If from 2000 to abandon all the north to build a factory, founded SMIC, 52-year-old Zhang Rujing's future life has been doomed to be intertwined with the history of China's semiconductor industry core acid.
He needs to be at the forefront of every critical moment of industrial development - whether it is the founding of SMIC, or the end of the history of China's largest silicon chips, Xinen's CIDM practice, or the accumulation tower semiconductor that focuses on the manufacture of characteristic processes integrated circuit chips.
Also always unexpectedly at the most critical moment of enterprise development, wave goodbye. From SMIC, Xinsheng Semiconductor, Xinen to Jita Semiconductor, from Taiwan to Shanghai, from Shanghai to Qingdao, and then from Qingdao back to Shanghai, the 75-year-old Zhang Rujing returned to the place where he started his business - at that time, SMIC was selected by The Times under the leadership of Zhang Rujing, began a long road of catch-up, groping for its own position in the global industrial chain.
If you put the time forward, from the time of birth, Chang Ru-ching came to Taiwan with his parents from infancy, and grew up, and walked on an invisible tightrope all his life - he needs to use his Chinese-American identity in Taiwan to seek the "biggest common factor" of the fastest growth of China's semiconductor industry, but also inevitably needs to endure criticism, helplessness and contradiction.
It was 2019, and Zhang Rujing, who was still in Xinen at the time, repeatedly emphasized to surging news reporters in a slightly Taiwanese accent of Mandarin Chinese.
From this point of view, if SMIC is the enterprise chosen by The Times, is Zhang Rujing not the "chosen person"? The origin of his life, his identity, his experience, or the era in which he lived, doomed him to be unable to stay out of it like others.
It is also this sense of mission that "must participate" that makes Zhang Rujing decide to start a business again and again, taking the twists and turns and regrets in the eyes of outsiders as outside things, he feels that these regrets are just "small splash" or "a ripple", "in eternity it can be ignored".
To some extent, from the difficult start to the dilemma of breaking through the neck from the industrial chain, Zhang Rujing's personal fate and the fate of China's semiconductors are written and dependent on each other. The so-called "chip war" is essentially a larger level of "interdependence", not only relying on the open support of the government, capital, enterprises and ecology, but also relying on the beliefs and choices of chip leaders.
