Starting From the Chip in 1991

Chapter 68 Now You See How Impressive It Is

Through her sunglasses, Chen Jing took in all the people looking at her. If one looked closely, they would realize that she wasn't as calm as she appeared — her right hand, gripping the handle of her rolling suitcase, was tense, and faint veins stood out. When she saw the young man, only eighteen years old but cunning like an old fox, Chen Jing's chest heaved slightly, and she slowly relaxed.

"Hello, President Chen. Let me introduce you. This is my uncle, Zhang Ke," Su Yuanshan said, shaking her hand and immediately introducing his uncle.

Chen Jing already knew who Zhang Ke was. She quickly took off her sunglasses, smiled warmly, and revealed a delicate dimple: "Hello, President Zhang."

Uncle Zhang exchanged a subtle glance with Su Yuanshan before laughing heartily: "Hello, hello. Welcome to the provincial capital, President Chen."

Su Yuanshan understood that small glance perfectly — his uncle clearly didn't believe this woman was as fierce as he had described. He shrugged and casually picked up Chen Jing's suitcase.

"No need, I can handle it myself."

"It's fine, you're a guest from afar. How could we let you carry it yourself?" Su Yuanshan said with a grin, placing the suitcase into the car's trunk and courteously opening the car door for her. At the same time, he shot his uncle a knowing look.

Uncle Zhang immediately understood — on the way here, they had already discussed how to receive Chen Jing. It was clear from her tone on the phone that she was a bit annoyed. After all, asking Berlin to help find clients was nothing major, but promising to send engineers and then sending only a few interns was quite another matter.

Thus, they decided to treat her warmly and casually, not too formally — after all, she had come alone.

The uncle and nephew chatted enthusiastically with Chen Jing along the way, asking about her family and hometown, and Chen Jing responded politely, maintaining the poise of a well-mannered lady.

When they arrived at Jiangdu Building, Yuanchip had already closed for the day. Zhang Ke and Su Yuanshan carried her luggage upstairs and helped her check into the hotel — the foreign guest hotel was conveniently located just a few floors above their offices.

"Alright, let's talk business now," Chen Jing said seriously just as Su Yuanshan was about to leave after dropping her suitcase at the door. She turned around, her face now quite solemn. "Young Su General Manager, there's an urgent matter."

Su Yuanshan exchanged a glance with his uncle and chuckled: "Even if it's urgent, can't it wait until tomorrow?"

"It can't," Chen Jing said, shaking her head slightly, a frown appearing between her brows. "We have a motherboard design. It was half-completed in Protel, but when we imported the project into Yuanchip's EDA using the open-source plugin from your forum, it failed the simulation no matter what we did..."

She paused, glancing toward the corridor, then lowered her voice: "This motherboard is supposed to be supplied to Compaq. It's a batch of 100,000 units — we can't afford to mess this up."

At the mention of technical issues, Su Yuanshan immediately grew serious. "We have an after-sales support team in the Special Economic Zone. What did they say?"

"They and your electronics factory's engineers spent all day yesterday on it. Their conclusion was that there's no problem with EDA — but also no problem with our design. No matter how they adjusted it, it kept showing error messages. Finally, they suggested I contact you directly."

"Those guys..." Su Yuanshan muttered, scratching his waist and looking at his uncle. "Uncle, do you want to wait here or go back first?"

Seeing the anxiety on Chen Jing's face, Zhang Ke smiled: "I'll head back. Besides, I wouldn't understand the technical stuff anyway. Should I order some food for you?"

"No need yet," Su Yuanshan said, shaking his head.

Chen Jing pulled a briefcase out of her rolling suitcase and took out two floppy disks, handing them to Su Yuanshan.

"Both disks are the same. One's a backup. Are you... going to check it now?"

Su Yuanshan chuckled: "Just now you couldn't even wait a night to dump this problem on me. Now you're asking if I want to check? President Chen, a little more honesty, please."

Chen Jing also smiled slightly: "I didn't say you had to work overtime."

"Fine, I'll do it voluntarily — if I don't check, I won't be able to sleep."

The two went down to the ninth floor. Su Yuanshan unlocked the door and switched on the lights.

Looking at the sea of computer workstations, Chen Jing was visibly surprised: "You have so many people in your design team?"

"Not really," Su Yuanshan explained as he led her toward the engineering work area. "The downstairs team is mostly communications and architecture people. Upstairs we have about two hundred workstations — all software developers."

"It's been a headache trying to expand. If we rent more space upstairs, we'll have to move everything again next year when our new tech park is ready."

Chen Jing shook her head and smiled: "A pure engineering team of 400 people is already considered a very large R&D company."

"This is nothing," Su Yuanshan thought to himself. In the future, any serious chip project would have at least a thousand engineers — otherwise, you wouldn't even have the qualifications to speak.

He opened a workstation, imported the project files, ran a preliminary electrical test, and found no problems. He immediately launched the simulation.

Since it was a PCB project, the simulation was fairly quick. Before long, multiple error messages popped up.

Su Yuanshan's brows furrowed sharply.

Chen Jing pulled a chair over and sat beside him. Seeing his serious expression, she whispered: "Before I left this morning, I called my brother. He said it might be an issue with the plugin we used to convert the project."

Su Yuanshan stared at the data and shook his head without hesitation: "Impossible. The plugin's fine."

"How can you be so sure?" Chen Jing asked, puzzled.

"Because I wrote that plugin myself. The source code has my signature: SYS," Su Yuanshan said, folding his arms and staring unblinkingly at the data on screen.

Chen Jing opened her mouth but found herself speechless. She could only sit quietly, staring at the dull simulation interface with him.

When the simulation ended, Su Yuanshan turned to her: "Did you bring the motherboard design specifications?"

"I did," Chen Jing said, opening her briefcase and handing over a thick stack of documents.

Seeing her pretend calmness barely covering her anxiety, Su Yuanshan smiled faintly.

"What are you laughing at?"

"Nothing... I was just wondering if your brother really thinks I'm some kind of magic boy who can solve anything."

The truth was, he did know a bit about motherboards — after all, during his time at Intel, he had worked on chipsets. Plus, motherboards nowadays were simple affairs, usually just four-layer boards.

Su Yuanshan flipped through the specs, checking against the project files. Time slipped by silently, until his pager buzzed — and at the same time, he heard a soft grumble beside him.

"Ah, I forgot you haven't eaten yet," Su Yuanshan said apologetically.

Chen Jing blushed slightly and shook her head: "I'm fine, not hungry."

"Hehe, wait a minute." Su Yuanshan called home to report his whereabouts, then rummaged through his drawer, pulling out a stash of snacks he had learned to hoard from Xi Xiaoding.

"Here, have some snacks first. I'm almost done."

Chen Jing nodded, intending to politely decline, but Su Yuanshan had already turned back to the screen. Truly the purest of engineering nerds.

Chen Jing thought silently to herself as she opened a packet of biscuits and poured herself a cup of water from the thermos.

Minute after minute passed. She rested her chin on her hand, glancing at the clock now and then — it was already close to ten at night. Meanwhile, Su Yuanshan, apart from nibbling on a few biscuits and sipping some water, hadn't even turned around once.

Watching him continuously annotate and correct the project schematics, Chen Jing couldn't help but think: this guy is way too obsessed with technology. Could a man like this even find a girlfriend? Probably only if he found someone willing to act like his nanny.

Just as her thoughts wandered off, she saw Su Yuanshan reopen the simulation window.

Chen Jing immediately tensed and focused all her attention on the screen.

The simulation progress bar crawled toward completion — no error messages appeared.

"Done."

Before the simulation was even fully complete, Su Yuanshan exhaled heavily and spun his chair around, only to nearly crash into Chen Jing standing very close behind him.

"Uh... sorry."

But Chen Jing didn't seem to mind at all. Her voice trembled slightly with excitement: "That's it? It's fixed?"

"Of course. The main issue was that your designers used improper standards in Protel, causing Yuanchip's EDA auto-correction functions to fail. Simply put, even if you had finished this design in Protel, it would have failed final simulation. Or maybe it would pass, but the motherboard would be defective."

"Our EDA caught it at the final stage. Now you understand how impressive we are?" Su Yuanshan had already moved his chair back a full meter and smiled warmly at her.

Chen Jing relaxed her fists. A genuine smile bloomed at the corners of her lips, and a deep dimple appeared.

"Impressive!"

"Come on, let's go eat," Su Yuanshan said, standing up — only to stumble slightly from hunger and fatigue.

(End of Chapter 68)

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