After ten years of hard work, I will sit on the hot “cold bench”. Wen Ming, chief scientist of Yunnan Precious Metals Group and director of the National Key Laboratory of Precious Metals Functional Materials, has been deeply engaged in the precious metal field for 20 years, leading the team to break the foreign technology monopoly, and achieve domestic sputtering targets from scratch and from existence to excellence, making the “Chinese core” passionate. He and his team experienced the long scientific research march of target materials breaking through, witnessed the ice-breaking journey of the reorganization of the National Key Laboratory, and finally brought Chinese target materials to the world. After being awarded the title of National Model Worker in April this year, Wenming was awarded the title of “Yunling Model” by the Provincial Party Committee Propaganda Department on June 14.
Ten years of sharpening swords, target material breaks through the cocoon
Sputtering targets are an indispensable key raw material in chip manufacturing. Before 2010, our province was almost blank in the field of target materials.
In 2007, after graduating from Wenming's Ph.D. in Materials, he went to work at the Kunming Institute of Precious Metals with a dream of serving the country with scientific research. “At the beginning of our research, domestic semiconductor devices and integrated circuits, that is, mid-to-high-end target materials used in the chip field, were basically monopolized by well-known foreign target materials companies and were completely controlled by others. Not only was the ordering cycle long, but the pricing power was also completely controlled by foreign countries.” Wenming made up his mind: to master key core technologies and get rid of the dilemma of being controlled by others.
In 2008, the “breakthrough” task of localization of sputtering targets was handed over to Wen Ming. A piece of imported target sample, a product manual, and a team of four people were all the “owners” of the project team at that time. Wenming led the team to start from scratch, rolling blanks, turning products, and processing waste, and doing all the work. In order to speed up the research and development progress, they stayed in the laboratory day and night, soak instant noodles when they were hungry, and sniffed on the chair for a while, and went all out to race against time.
In 2012, the company selected Wenming to Australia to carry out postdoctoral research. After completing his studies, the tutor kept him with generous conditions, but he was concerned about the target material project that was in a “bottleneck” in China and resolutely returned to China.
In the years after returning to China, Wenming led the project to gradually “break through”, achieved a major breakthrough in 2014, and began small-scale production. Since then, the products have filled the domestic gap, successfully replaced imports, and built a production line with an annual output of 3,000 pieces of target materials. The product was rated as “the overall level of domestic leadership and international advanced”, and won the China Nonferrous Metals Industry Science and Technology Progress Award and the first prize of the Yunnan Provincial People's Government's technological invention. A well-known American semiconductor company came to the forefront and took the initiative to contact the procurement, and the products were exported. Nickel-platinum target products are typical scientific and technological achievements in Yunnan Province and are collected by the National Museum and the History Exhibition Hall of the Communist Party of China.
Become the “National Mainland” reorganization and attack the toughest
The National Key Laboratory established by the Precious Metals Group in 2010 is the first “national heavyweight” established by Yunnan provincial enterprises, and it is also the only “national heavyweight” in my country with precious metals as its main research direction. Whether it can be successfully reorganized is of great importance.
At the end of 2020, the restructuring work was officially launched. Wen Ming, as the director of the “National Mainland China”, fell into deep anxiety: some laboratories of the same type had failed in the preliminary restructuring review after the original “National Mainland China” restructuring; the group lacked high-end talents, insufficient leading talents represented by academicians, a small number of national science and technology awards, and basic research capabilities need to be improved. In addition, Yunnan is located in the southwest and has no obvious location advantages. Faced with many difficulties, Wenming embarked on a challenging journey, and responsibility and courage supported him to devote himself to it.
In order to achieve the goal, Wenming carefully consulted more than 10 academicians in this field and dozens of experts, asked humbly, and wrote several notebooks full of suggestions. He led his team to more than 10 key universities and research institutes in China to learn from the experience, from organizational structure to results display, from talent training to platform construction, carefully recorded every detail. After he came back, he revised the report materials alone for more than 40 rounds. In order to simulate the defense, he and his colleagues sorted out more than 50 questions, summarized and condensed the answers to each question repeatedly, and stacked the A4 papers that were used up almost as high as an adult.
Under the leadership and support of the provincial party committee, provincial government, provincial science and technology department and precious metals group, the restructuring was approved after more than 1,300 days and nights of unremitting efforts. When the news came, Wenming shed tears in excitement.
Transformation and transition from laboratory to market
In March 2024, Guiyan Advanced New Materials (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. was registered and established. The former target material research room has become a market-oriented company, which is a new challenge for Wenming. How to make the company stand firm and achieve profitability has become something he has to think about every day.
Wen Ming decisively took out the “three tricks”. Strengthen scientific research, increase the research and development of high-purification, low-defect, homogenization, and large-scale target material preparation technologies, create a complete closed-loop technology chain from waste recycling, refining to target material remanufacturing, effectively improve the company's comprehensive competitiveness; run the market, take the sales team to actively visit customers, impress customers with samples and data, and the products will eventually be exported to Malaysia, Czech Republic, Germany, Taiwan, etc.; expand the industry, use Kunming as the production base and Shanghai as the window to radiate across the country, and both sides make efforts at the same time. When you see the orders sent by customers and the production line is running at full capacity, Wenming truly realized that the transformation of scientific research results is not a simple technology transfer, but a team that needs to move from “laboratory thinking” to “market thinking”. You must not only adhere to the “roots” of technological innovation, but also follow the “qi” of market demand.
After hard work, the company achieved remarkable results in its establishment year, and its profits increased exponentially compared with the previous year. It ranked first among the metal suppliers of a semiconductor company in the United States, becoming the largest Schottky diode manufacturer and major supplier of precious metal targets in China. The cumulative new output value was 350 million yuan, of which exports earned US$7.22 million, which also drove downstream industries to create significant economic and social benefits.
Wenming said that his biggest wish is to “be able to compete on the same stage with foreign companies so that the Chinese people will no longer be controlled by others.” He and his partners are working hand in hand, caring about the “big thing in the country” and striving to climb to the peak of scientific and technological independence and self-improvement in the field of precious metals new materials in my country. (Yunbao All-Media Reporter Chen Xiaobo Hu Yuya)