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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 mother-boards 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/DSpeechEncoder

ChannelEncoder

GMSKRF

Modulator

Baseband

PowerAmplifier

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A wireless LAN system diagram.

DigitalSignal

DigitalModulator

ChannelEncoder LPF

LPF A/D

A/D

fc

fc

PowerAmplifier

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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 h

ave 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 countries.

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寧拙毋巧

划至深處 (耶穌 )

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Thank you.