CEO Essays 2020_03_25

Atoms come into your sight when you magnify a child's hand in a 10 billion-fold microscope.

This picture, published in Newton magazine, is a step-by-step view of a child's hand, 10 times zoom per step with 10 steps, magnifying 10 billion-fold. A hair, a cell, a chromosome, a double helix structure made of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen-DNA-, an atom, and on the right side of the picture, orange balls in a round shape sphere are quarks and leptons-known as the smallest particles- which compose an atomic nucleus.

However, no one has seen the inside of an atom. It is an unprecedented and mysterious world that no one has yet been to.

So as a human body, if you magnify the semiconductor chip, you can see it is also made of atomic units. The picture above shows the disassembled mobile phone, magnifying it. 

Electronic engineering, represented by the semiconductor chip, manufactured in cutting edge technology, encounters life science, which studies a human body, a complex system of living organisms at the atomic level. For my whole life, I have been designed CPU semiconductor chips for 37 years.

"So what? The man who does not seek no glory, no money, no position, no honor, no life is the most difficult to deal with. Only such a person can achieve greater things", Saigo Takamori said, a Japanese politician in the 19th century. Nothing can stop the one rushing into something stubbornly.

• President of Softbank, Son Masayoshi
  

I seek nothing else. I have been sculpted CPUs for the past 37 years, appreciating Orhan Pamuk's feeling, who says he had written like digging a well with a needle.

The motivation to myself being committed to the CPU for the past 37 years, obviously I was fascinated by the CPU itself, however, was the desire for the answers about 'what is life?', 'What am I?', 'Why do I exist?', and so 'How should I live?'

I expected that the fruit of the most sophisticated nanotechnology, the semiconductor, which aims for the ultimate of material, and the computer that provides a super speed calculation for experimentation with material of the ultimate, would give a clue for finding my answers about life.

1982, the time I started my work for the first time in the national lab, I planned to understand the ultimate of material, digging to the very best technology of a semiconductor in an atomic scale, for 10 years. And for another 10 years, I wanted to study the most sophisticated computing technology, engaging it with the best semiconductor, to find out the essence of life.