175: Chapter 175: The Fourth Station on the Moon Concludes; The Eve of Sub-Nano Chip Development!
Alien civilization navigation timer, Day 69.
6:00 PM.
Pangu Laboratory, B2 Level.
Su Che finished reading the forty-third page of the Sub-nanometer Quantum Chip architecture blueprints, leaned back against the chair, and rubbed the back of his neck.
Since finishing the exchange for the isolation medium at 3:00 PM, he had gone through more than half of the process documentation for the entire chip.
The remaining details were not urgent; he would break them down item by item once work officially started tomorrow.
His handheld device vibrated twice in succession.
The first message was from Academician Sun Qiwen at the Jiuquan Launch Base.
"The verification ship's next launch is scheduled for 8:00 AM the day after tomorrow. The photolithography machine modules have been added to the highest-priority cargo list, and I will personally oversee the loading and balancing plan."
The second message was a voice message on a dedicated line from Lieutenant General Peng Zhenbang.
Su Che pressed play.
"Chief Engineer Su, here is the assembly progress report for the luan bird inside the Dry Dock."
"The power module sections are all in place, the structural welding is partially complete, and the self-repair modules have started embedding into the main skeleton. According to the current pace, assembly is progressing steadily."
"Additionally, at the Near-Earth Orbit Base, the internal wiring of the control module is mostly finished, the energy module has undergone self-checks, and the shell of the life support module is also being assembled."
"Everything has been normal these past two days."
Su Che replied with a text message: "The photolithography machine modules will go up the day after tomorrow. Clear an independent area in the Dry Dock's manufacturing cabin, and deploy temperature control and vibration damping according to the parameters I provided."
After sending the message, he placed his phone face down on the desk.
Once the pre-fabricated parts of the photolithography machine arrived at the Jiuquan Launch Base and were loaded, the verification ship would be transported to the Dry Dock for assembly, commissioning, and its first ignition.
Then, it would be the Sub-nanometer Quantum Chip.
Seven days.
Su Che leaned back against his chair and stared at the ceiling for five seconds.
The keyboard beside him remained silent.
There were no new files in the code repository waiting for him to write.
The photolithography machine design was finalized, and work on the chip would only officially begin tomorrow.
From the forty-seventh day until today, twenty-two days, he had not had a single full day of rest.
Lin Waner walked in from the side door.
She was carrying a cloth bag that was bulging, and she walked with a brisk pace.
"Let's go."
Su Che did not move.
"What for?"
"Go home and eat." Lin Waner placed the cloth bag on the operation console and pulled out a pair of new cotton slippers from inside.
The soles of the pair Su Che was wearing were already worn smooth, causing him to slip on the alloy floor.
"There is food in the laboratory."
"Eating laboratory food once in a while is fine." Lin Waner set the new slippers beside his chair. "I stewed some lamb spine."
Su Che looked down at the slippers.
Lamb spine.
He stood up and changed his shoes.
Zhao Mingyuan leaned over from the adjacent workstation and sniffed twice.
"What about me?"
"Order takeout yourself." Lin Waner did not even look back.
Zhao Mingyuan shrank back.
...
Alien civilization navigation timer, Day 70.
9:00 AM.
Pangu Laboratory, B2 Level.
Su Che walked out of the elevator wearing the new slippers he had changed into yesterday.
The anti-slip tread on the soles gripped the alloy floor, and he walked silently.
The sound of Wen Bo's enamel mug clinking against the desk came from the east side of the hall.
"Civilian resource processing equipment, done."
Wen Bo handed the final miniaturization adaptation test report to Liu Huaqiang.
The report was a thin three-page document with a handwritten label on the cover reading "Lunar Fourth Station".
This task had been completed a day early, and the test report had just been compiled.
The miniaturization work was not difficult; the core was to cut the power of the industrial-grade equipment to one-tenth and its volume to one-third, with the Moon's low-gravity environment providing a built-in load-reduction buff.
Liu Huaqiang signed it and tucked his mechanical pencil back behind his ear.
In Su Che's consciousness, a mechanical voice popped up right on time.
"Ding! Lunar sub-quest 'Miniaturized Lunar Alchemy Furnace!' completed!"
"Lunar civilian resource processing equipment miniaturization adaptation verified! Power reduced to one-tenth of the industrial version, volume reduced by two-thirds, and all aspects of the lunar surface low-gravity operating conditions met!"
"Task reward: 80,000 skill points!"
Immediately after—
"Ding! Detection of mass production demand for building materials at the Lunar Development Base, Lunar sub-quest triggered!"
"Task name: The First Brick on the Moon!"
"Task content: The resources are processed, but what about building materials? You can't let the robots use lunar dust to plaster walls! Please develop a simple building material molding machine for lunar soil. Using lunar soil solidification technology, press the processed lunar soil into bricks harder than Earth concrete!"
"Task reward: 80,000 skill points, unlock exchange permissions for lunar building material molding technology, soil solidification technology, and portable processing technology. Required exchange points: 40,000."
"Current host primary skill point balance is sufficient, redeem?"
"Redeem."
"Ding! 40,000 primary skill points consumed, core technology unlocked!"
"System prompt: Supporting auxiliary technologies have not yet been redeemed, including: building material molding machine blueprints (3,000 exchange points), soil solidification formula (2,000 exchange points), portable processing plan (2,000 exchange points), total exchange points: 7,000."
"Redeem all."
"Ding! 7,000 primary skill points consumed."
Su Che closed the panel and walked toward the east side.
"Fifth Lunar development item, building material molding machine."
He dictated the key parameters of the technical framework. "The solidification technology is the core. Wen Bo, you handle it. Dean Liu, you review the molding machine blueprints. Academician Li, you finalize the portable processing plan."
Wen Bo picked up the enamel mug from the floor; the "National Labor Model" on the side of the mug had picked up a smudge of dust.
"I've seen the solidification agent formula. The main ingredient is the silicate component of the lunar soil itself, which self-bonds after heat activation, and the auxiliary ingredient uses a small amount of polymer binder transported from Earth."
Wen Bo pointed at the row of sample bottles in the materials area with the rim of his mug. "The principle is simple. What's difficult is controlling the solidification rate in the vacuum environment of the lunar surface. Without air, the moisture evaporation path is completely different."
"That's why I'm having Academician Li finalize the portable processing plan; he has to calculate the heat-press molding temperature-pressure curve."
Academician Li Zhengyang stood up from behind the folding table, carrying his thermos.
"It's me again."
"What did you take as an elective in your undergraduate studies?" Wen Bo turned back.
"I didn't take solidification."
"Then it was in your doctoral thesis."
Academician Li Zhengyang did not deny it.
He walked to the materials area, flipped through the labels on the sample bottles, picked up a bottle of gray-white powder, and held it up to the light for two seconds.
"Lunar soil brought back by Chang'e 6 has a silicate content of 45 percent." Academician Li Zhengyang put the bottle back. "Heat-press temperature 800 degrees, pressure 50 megapascals, solidification time within twenty minutes."
"Did you calculate that just now or memorize it?"
"Common sense."
Su Che did not stay any longer.
The technical threshold for the lunar building material molding machine ranked in the lower-middle range of the entire Lunar Development Base project. With a four-day cycle allowed as a buffer, Liu Huaqiang's team could fully handle it.
On the main control console, an icon for an encrypted document flickered in the center of the screen.
It was sent by Zhou Dehai.
"All seven pre-fabricated modules of the photolithography machine have been loaded and shipped to the Jiuquan Launch Base. The final processing precision of the light source cavity core components exceeds the standard by three percent, and the process parameters for the seventh version of the Zhulong have been synchronized and archived."
Su Che opened the document and flipped to the factory inspection data for the light source cavity.
Every item was within the tolerance range.
He closed the document, opened the Sub-nanometer Quantum Chip architecture blueprints, and started reading line by line from the first page again.
Yesterday's quick reading was to scan the framework; today's close reading was to break down the processes.
The chip's manufacturing process was divided into three stages.
The first stage: substrate preparation. The ultra-high-purity silicon wafer undergoes atomic-level surface reconstruction in the deposition chamber of the integrated photolithography machine to smooth out all sub-nanometer-level defects.
The second stage: quantum dot arrangement. Using 64-atom parallel deposition technology, the logic gate structure of the chip is stacked layer by layer.
The third stage: quantum state locking. The state vector of every quantum dot is clamped to the design value, with an error of no more than one-thousandth.
The third stage was the most difficult.
Because this step required that empty calibration module, and the computing power of the calibration module relied precisely on the Sub-nanometer Quantum Chip itself.
A dead loop.
Su Che flipped to page sixty-one of the architecture blueprints, and the solution provided by the system was written in the bottom few lines of the remarks column.
The first chip would use a downgraded process: quantum dot arrangement density reduced to 60 percent of the design value, and quantum state locking precision relaxed to 1 percent.
This downgraded chip would have about 40 percent of the computing power of the full-spec version, but it would be sufficient to drive the calibration module.
Use the downgraded chip to calibrate the process parameters of the full-spec chip, then replace the downgraded version with the full-spec version, and iterate in a loop until all parameters met the standards.
Bootstrapping.
Use a semi-finished product to build a finished product, then use the finished product to build an even better finished product.
It was the same logic as a bootstrap compiler in the field of computer science.
Su Che closed the blueprints.
The seven-day process chain laid out in his mind.
Days 1 to 2: Assembly of the integrated photolithography machine in orbit.
Day 3: Commissioning of the integrated machine and first no-load ignition.
Day 4: Manufacturing of the first downgraded chip.
Days 5 to 6: Using the downgraded chip to drive the calibration module and iterate the process parameters for the full-spec version.
Day 7: The first full-spec chip rolls off the line.
He pulled the keyboard over and created a new encrypted folder titled 'Sub-nanometer Quantum Chip · Process Manual'.
The first line of code was entered.
Zhao Mingyuan walked back from the cafeteria carrying a bowl of hot dry noodles and paused in the aisle behind Su Che.
"Started?"
"Started."
Zhao Mingyuan placed the noodle bowl on his own workstation and sat down to open his terminal.
"I'll take the deposition scheduling part of the process."
He pulled up the 64-atom parallel module that had been finalized yesterday. "The actual parameters for the in-orbit environment can only be obtained after the integrated machine goes up, but simulation pre-adaptation can be done first."
Su Che did not turn around, his fingers tapping out a steady rhythm on the keyboard.
The space footage in the center of the monitoring wall refreshed silently.
Inside the Dry Dock, several more silver-gray cabin sections had been added to the main skeleton of the luan bird.
The micro-capillary network of the self-repair modules extended from the welding gaps, looking like capillaries growing on a metal surface.
In the small window in the lower right corner, the outline of the Near-Earth Orbit Base was becoming increasingly clear.
The shell of the control module had been completely closed, and the self-check indicator lights of the energy module were lighting up in rows of green.
On Su Che's screen, the number of lines of code in the process manual was rising from zero.
His handheld device vibrated once.
It was from Academician Sun Qiwen at the Jiuquan Launch Base.
"All seven modules of the photolithography machine have arrived at the Jiuquan Launch Base, loading and balancing are complete, and the verification ship will lift off at 8:00 AM tomorrow morning."
Su Che replied with one word.
"Good."
The air conditioning filter on the B2 level had been changed, and the sound from the vents was noticeably quieter than last week.
The piece of white tape on the knuckle of Su Che's right index finger was still there.
Lin Waner had changed it for him last night.