Chapter 9 Amateur Players vs. Professional Players
After returning home with his father, Su Yuanshan spent some time accompanying his mother, Zhang Xiuyun, watching a TV drama titled "Legend of the Heroic Knights of Yiwei." During commercial breaks, she inevitably nagged him a little. Only after Su Xinghe finished his bath was Su Yuanshan allowed to retreat.
Standing under the simple water heater, Su Yuanshan's mind was still full of chip designs.
The internal structure of a pager was not complex. A signal would be received through a radio-frequency antenna, pass through a filter, then go to the decoder chip. The decoded signal would be sent to a register and finally to the output unit, like the screen or buzzer. The decoder chip itself wasn't complicated either, just a highly customized CMOS chip.
However, if Su Yuanshan wanted to define a brand-new Chinese character encoding standard, it would complicate things.
Current paging stations were mainly run by Motorola and Pioneer. They used modular single-chip microcontrollers for encoding. In theory, as long as you designed a compatible single-chip, you could handle it. However, expecting his father to develop a full single-chip design in just one or two months was unrealistic.
And since Yuanxin needed to make a splash with this first product, it had to be completely independently developed. Otherwise, where was the prestige?
Looks like I'll need to visit a real paging station, Su Yuanshan thought. Designing everything blind would be too risky.
After finishing his bath, Su Yuanshan went back to the living room to say goodnight to his parents, preparing to head into his study when his mother called out to him.
"Xiaoshan, your dad told me that the programming competition has officially opened registration. You're running off to your dad's company every day—have you been preparing properly? Have you learned anything?"
Su Yuanshan blinked and looked at his father, who gave him a helpless smile.
Su Yuanshan laughed awkwardly. "Don't worry, Mom. I'll whip up something decent."
Zhang Xiuyun wasn't pleased with his casual attitude. "What's with that attitude! You think winning the top prize is easy?"
"Uh... Mom," Su Yuanshan said with a chuckle, "I'll take it seriously, one hundred percent."
Only then did Zhang Xiuyun grunt in satisfaction. "You better. Don't think just because you know a bit about computers that you're invincible. There's always someone better out there. Remember, you're not just competing against high schoolers. This time, vocational school and technical school students are allowed too!"
Su Yuanshan was surprised and turned to his father for confirmation.
Su Xinghe shrugged. "The Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Machinery and Electronics both decided that if the competition only involved high school students, the results would look too shabby. So they opened it up to vocational and technical school students too."
Su Yuanshan sighed. So it wasn't just amateurs anymore. Now it was amateurs versus professionals.
In the early 90s, getting into a good vocational school was harder than getting into a regular high school. Especially in rural areas, many top students chose vocational schools to quickly find stable government jobs. In other words, he would be competing against the best and most practical-minded students across the country.
He couldn't afford to take this lightly.
Su Xinghe quickly explained the rules for the First National High School Electronic Circuit and Programming Competition.
Since it was the inaugural event, they wanted it to be both respectable and bulletproof. The competition would have two rounds: initial submissions and final evaluations. Only the special prize and first prize winners would be invited to the University of Electronic Science and Technology for final defenses to prevent cheating.
The contest had two categories: electronic circuit design and programming design. Winners of either special prize would be admitted to UESTC without taking the college entrance exam. First prize winners might get either admission or bonus points depending on their final presentation. Second and third prize winners would receive certificates only.
Submissions were due by September 1st, based on the postmark. Judging would happen from September to November, with awards given on December 1st.
"Make sure you take it seriously," Zhang Xiuyun reminded him again before letting him go.
"I will, I will. I'll go code right now," Su Yuanshan laughed and escaped to his study.
Turning on his EDA software, Su Yuanshan created a new project and began designing his entry.
He spent two whole days locked up at home.
After lunch one day, he finally rode his worn-out bicycle to Jiangdu Building.
By the time he arrived at the company, the organizational reshuffle was already complete. The group working on the single-chip project had been sent back to the university's labs.
Normally, dividing teams like this would involve a lot of arguing, but not at Yuanxin. Here, there was no doubt about who led: the boss himself, Su Yuanshan, and the technical director, Xi Xiaoding.
As a result, everyone had obediently accepted their assignments.
Senior Brother Tian Yaoming, who was now responsible for the paging project, had initially been reluctant. But when he learned that Su Yuanshan would personally assist him, he immediately understood that this group was the real priority.
Tian Yaoming was one of the second batch of "loaned" talents from the university.
He had originally planned to "borrow" some experience and then return to school to enjoy the prestige of having participated in a cutting-edge project.
But now, seeing the scale of Yuanxin's ambition, he realized he might have to stay longer than expected.
"Good morning, Senior Brother Tian," Su Yuanshan greeted cheerfully.
"Morning, Xiaoshan," Tian Yaoming replied with a smile, comfortably settled into his private office.
"Senior Brother, how should we proceed?" Su Yuanshan asked.
Tian Yaoming straightened up. He wasn't arrogant. He knew that Su Yuanshan wasn't just a brilliant coder but also had shockingly deep knowledge of integrated circuits.
"We're mainly focusing on pagers, right? I studied them during my master's. They're simple."
"That's good," Su Yuanshan said. "I'll be designing the encoding and decoding chips. I've already defined their pinouts, specifications, and basic functions. I'll send them to you. Please add them to the component library."
"Alright." Tian Yaoming nodded but then hesitated. "Wait... did you say you finished designing two chips already?"
"Just the pin definitions," Su Yuanshan said casually. "No instruction sets yet."
Tian Yaoming wiped the cold sweat from his forehead. Two days. It had only been two days since Su Yuanshan announced the project. If he had completed full designs in that time, Tian Yaoming would have started suspecting he wasn't human.
"So, we don't need to touch the chips?" Tian Yaoming asked.
"Correct," Su Yuanshan nodded. "We'll focus on designing the pager circuit boards and preparing a new encoder module compatible with existing paging stations."
"I can arrange that," Tian Yaoming said. "Our major cooperates with the postal and telecommunications bureau. Finding someone to give us access to a paging station won't be hard."
"Good. Let's get started," Su Yuanshan said, walking away toward the workstation area.
Just before he left, Tian Yaoming called out, "What about the main controller and the LCD driver? If we're adding Chinese display, we'll need new chips."
Su Yuanshan paused, scratching his head. He had completely forgotten about that.
"Should we just stick a black blob on it?"
Tian Yaoming laughed. "You've designed all this so perfectly, and now you want to ruin it with a cheap epoxy chip?"
"Alright, alright," Su Yuanshan sighed. "Give me half a day. I'll design a main controller and a driver."
Entering the workstation office, Su Yuanshan inserted a floppy disk and imported the pager chip project.
He hadn't lied earlier.
He really had already finished almost everything.
The only thing left was to define the instruction set.
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