Transcript How Can We Improve O..

How Can We Improve Our
Communications Industry?
李家同
暨南國際大學資管及資工系
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 A very serious question facing us today.
 What kind of industries should our country
have?
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 Certainly, we cannot afford to have those
industries which are competitive because of
their low costs due to mainland China.
 Labor, land and almost everything else are
cheaper there.
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 The only industries which we can have are
those which have very high technology
threshold. So high that our major competitor,
mainland China, can hardly compete with us.
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

At the end of the Chin Dynasty, some of
our enlightened ancestors started to build
factories, nearly all around Shanghai.
There are two characteristics of them:
 For internal use, never for exporting.
 All turn-key factories.
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 We remained essentially an agricultural
country for a long time until 1970’s.
 Suddenly, we started to export.
 The ability of exporting is a sign that we are
now an industrialized country.
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 We could export for three reasons.
1.Although many factories were still turn-key
factories, the technologies required to run
these factories were much higher than
before.
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2.The costs incurred were low as compared
with many of our neighboring countries.
3.High quality of our products.
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 For example, we have had a quite successful
PC industry for a long time because of the
following:
1.We could design and manufacture motherboards well with low cost.
2.We could quickly design new chip sets after
Intel announces a new CPU.
3.We have an IC manufacturing industry which
produces the chip sets here with high quality.
4.The costs incurred were relatively low.
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 But, our PC industry now faces sharp
competition from the PC industries in
mainland China.
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 A mobile phone system diagram.
A/D
Speech
Encoder
Channel
Encoder
GMSK
RF
Modulator
Power
Amplifier
Baseband
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 A wireless LAN system diagram.
fc
Digital
Signal
Channel
Encoder
Digital
Modulator
LPF
A/D
LPF
A/D
Power
Amplifier
fc
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Bad news:
 As far as I know, for all mobile phones and
wireless LAN cards made in Taiwan, all
chips inside them are not made in Taiwan.
 We are at best a system house.
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 Why is it so difficult for us to design chips for
mobile phone phones and wireless LAN
cards while not so difficult for us to design
PC chip sets?
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Reason 1:
 Communication technology itself is much
more complicated than computer technology.
 The history of communication technology is
much longer than that of computer
technology.
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Reason 2:
 Unfortunately, because of national security
reasons, our government had forbidden us
to fool around with communications systems
for a long time.
 We therefore started much later than those
developed countries, such as US, France
and Japan.
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Reason 3:
 In communication systems, analog circuits
have to be designed for both baseband and
RF band.
 Yet, analog circuit design has been
neglected for a long time in our country.
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Reason 4:
 Digital circuit design can be verified by
simulation and it is much harder to do the
same thing to analog circuit design.
 The design of analog circuits is almost like
an art.
 It needs much more experience.
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Reason 5:
 Communication systems often involve high
frequencies.
 In such circumstances, the mastering of
electromagnetic theory is very important.
 Again, unfortunately, electromagnetic theory
has been neglected by us for long time.
 A few students understand EM theory
thoroughly.
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Reason 6:
 The experts in VLSI design are often not
experts in communications and vice versa.
 Many communication chip design companies
know semi-conductor technology very well.
This is usually why their chips are so
competitive (low cost, low power and high
speed).
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Reason 7:
 In baseband, software knowledge can
hardly be ignored.
 In other words, electrical engineers have to
be familiar with imbedded systems.
 But most electrical engineers are soft on
software.
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Reason 8:
 We cannot hire computer engineers to do
the work because most of them, except my
students, know nothing about
communication.
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 For instance, they don’t know why bits can
be mixed.
 They therefore have a hard time to
understand QPSK, CDMA and OFDM etc.
 They have no idea about transmission line.
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How to solve the problem?
 My major suggestion is to forget about the
fancy topics and let us start a campaign to
produce good engineers who can design
chips for the communication industry.
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 But good engineers are not produced by
having up in the air lectures, seminars and
conferences.
 Good engineers are produced by hands-on
experience and hard work.
 I suggest that we start from the university
education.
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1. Make sure that electrical engineering
students know more about software and the
concept of algorithms.
2. Make sure that more computer science
students understand electrical engineering.
3. If possible, merge these two departments to
make a much stronger department.
4. Make more communication major electrical
engineering students be able to design chips.
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5. Make sure that there are a larger group of
electrical engineering students who know
EM theory quite well. I don’t like the
situation that antenna is only taught in
graduate schools. Note that there are
very fancy antennas for mobile phone
base stations. Our country can never
become a leading communication country
if we are behind in antenna design.
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6. For all electrical engineering students,
emphasize circuit design., especially
analog circuit design.
7. Encourage high school students to be
interested in audio and video systems.
Establish clubs for youngsters to be
familiar with power amplifiers and so
on very early.
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8. Establish a web-site to exhibit circuits,
especially analog circuits, so that students
would not be scared by circuit design. (Is
it true that those students who are well
versed are those who read many books?
I therefore believe that students who are
exposed to circuit design often will be
good in circuit design.)
9. Hold seminars for students and
professors to exchange experiences in
designing circuits.
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Our goal: To produce engineers who can
build low cost, high speed and low power
chips for our communications industry.
This goal will never be achieved if we only
talk about fancy ideas.
This goal will be achieved if we go back to
basics. That is, if our students have basic
knowledge about circuit design, especially
analog circuit design, there is no reason that
we cannot compete with other advanced
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countries.
寧拙毋巧
划至深處(耶穌)
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Thank you.
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