The country’s widespread economic boycott led by Vladimir Putin over its invasion of Ukraine has prevented Russian chip designers like Baikal, Yadro and others from using foreign foundries to manufacture their own chips. In principle, the answer would be as simple as making them in your territory. Unfortunately, Russia is behind in semiconductors.
It has been several decades since the Cold War theoretically ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the world’s geographically largest country’s relations with the so-called Western world have not been fully consolidated and the country Slavic which was an empire recently more than a century does not forget the ancient glories, many of which are still in the memory of many living. This is why they wanted to be leaders or at least competitive in various strategic sectors.
One of them is the manufacture of semiconductors, what we call chips, and you can’t say they’ve done well in that regard. While they have the ability to design their own chips, their ability to mass-produce them has fallen further and further behind technologically. This problem is not new, but it has been dragging on since the early 1990s when the productive force of the USSR was left outside Russia after the collapse of 1991. Which countries benefited the most? Germany, Belarus and Ukraine. In any case, the land of the tsars for a long time had no interest in developing a competitive chip manufacturing industry, and its industry froze in time.
JSC Mikron, the Russian Intel
JSC Mikron, is the largest chip manufacturing company that exists in the whole Slavic country, because they not only manufacture but also design their products, it would be the equivalent of Intel and more than half of the hardware they manufacture in-house and export from Russia is from this company. It is about the evolution towards a private society of the research institute of molecular electronics in moscowwhich It was founded in 1964 in the midst of the space race. Being its purely military utility. Today they manufacture RFID chips for credit cards, SIM cards and other types of smart cards. All for domestic use in a country that has degenerated into a completely self-sufficient economy.
Its factories produce 100, 150 and 200 millimeter wafers. Very far from the 300 used today by the largest foundries in the world. Not only that, but they are so technologically outdated that in 2010 they signed an agreement to use ST Microelectronics’ 90nm node. To temporarily place you, products under this node from TSMC and Intel started being produced in 2003, which meant that ten years ago in Russia there was a gap of 9 years.
Why Russia is not competitive in semiconductors
Let’s go back to 2014, when the conflict between Ukraine and Russia began to escalate and the first international sanctions arrived. Which led the Russians preemptively to create their own program to manufacture semiconductor devices. The idea was none other than to stop depending on foundries located in countries under American influence and no longer depend on China for manufacturing.
For the 65nm node, JSC Mikron decided to develop it in-house and there was an announcement about the node. However, the announcement was a huge hoax. As it was not a viable node for mass manufacturing. The reason for this is that Russia had to import from abroad the machines needed to manufacture chips under this node.
As they were never built in the Slavic country. Today is the maximum node they can reach and if we take into account that in 2022 the most advanced node that can be reached at TSMC is the 3nm node, we can get an idea of the reason why Russia cannot replace TSMC and Intel either. .
Keep in mind the 65nm node is from the year 2005 so we’re talking if the node was released in 2014 as promised it would be 9 years old but it’s 2022 and therefore we’re talking about a technological backwardness for russia in semiconductors 17 years. Which led to the design made in Russia becoming factory-free and therefore designed in Russia but manufactured in foreign companies, especially TSMC. Its most complex design being the Baikal BE-M1000, of which we once gave you a review.