Article in Russian... Here below a machine translation
Sanctions prospects for microelectronics in Russia
An interesting article by Denis Shamiryan ( @CorneliusAgrippa ) "Microelectronics in Russia before and after 24.02.2022" about the current state of microelectronics production in Russia and about the possibilities in the conditions of large-scale Western sanctions to create a fully localized production of microelectronic components.
Micron
Installation of lithography at JSC "Mikron" in Zelenograd (Moscow) (c) "Made by us"
In light of recent events (for posterity: google Russia, Ukraine, February 24, 2022), which led to the imposition of sanctions against Russia in the field of high technologies and, in particular, microelectronics, I often hear the question: what next? What is the current state of Russian microelectronic production? Will Russia be able to create a completely local production of chips?
I must say right away that this article does not pretend to be a comprehensive independent analysis of the situation, but reflects my personal point of view, based largely not on open sources, but on experience: more than 20 years in the industry, 15 years abroad, as in R&D (IMEC) , and in mass production (Global Foundries) plus 8 years in Russia (launching a MEMS production plant from scratch), personal communication, opinions of other specialists; in general, everything for which it is impossible or very difficult to find evidence. Therefore, I will not provide proofs - everyone has their own point of view and the right to express it (at least for now).
I will only talk about production technologies, since I myself am a former technologist, I have never had anything to do with design, and phrases like “licensing processor cores” are dark and incomprehensible to me.
I also note that I will only talk about CMOS production, firstly because this topic is most interesting to consumers (this is consumer electronics - processors, memory, etc.), and secondly, I worked abroad in CMOS (aka CMOS ) production and have a good idea of it from the inside, thirdly, I myself am now working in the MEMS industry and I will not write about it, since I am an interested party.
The article consists of three parts:
Analysis of current manufacturers
Reflections on the topic of completely local production of microelectronics
An attempt to look into the future
Analysis of the current situation
First, let's look at the current manufacturers of microelectronics. I will only talk about more or less modern factories capable of producing microcircuits according to the 180 nm process technology and below. To make it clear, I will give examples of processors produced according to a certain technology, the data is taken from Wikipedia, there in the article there is a column on the right with all technical processes, you can click and see what was produced for this technical process (and when). So, 180 nm is the beginning of the 2000s, processors such as Intel Celeron and PlayStation 2. We will not consider any old Soviet factories (such as NZPP) working on technologies larger than a micron (for example, Intel 80286 was made using 1.5 micron technology) .
A small caveat about the size of the plates. Modern production works on either 200 mm (up to 90 nm) or 300 mm (65 nm and below) silicon wafers. The most advanced hardware for sub-65nm technologies only exists in the 300mm variant. Therefore, it will not work to make high technologies on 200 mm plates. And equipment for 300 mm wafers is significantly (many times) more expensive than equipment for 200 mm wafers.
So what do we have at the moment.
Micron
Mikron is the most lively microelectronic production in Russia. They work on 200 mm wafers, they have 180 nm technology (in mass production), 90 nm (I'm not sure if it's very mass production, but I could be wrong; 90 nm is Intel Celeron M / D, AMD Athlon 64), 65 nm (here I have big doubts that there is mass production; 65 nm is AMD Turion 64 X2, Microsoft Xbox 360 "Falcon"). I once participated in attempts to develop 65 nm technology on 200 mm wafers (IMEC, Belgium), but the equipment did not pull, so the 65 nm process technology was transferred to 300 mm equipment.
Mikron produces in large volumes, mainly chips for bank cards, passports, subway tickets, etc. In small volumes, they produce what they were sanctioned for. They have been under sanctions for a long time, so they have already somehow learned how to deal with it. The turnover is more than 6 billion rubles, of which they earn about half themselves, the rest is donated by the state (for example, in the form of subsidies under Decree 109 of the Ministry of Industry and Trade - Micron is always among the recipients of subsidies there).
Angstrem-T
Do not confuse with just Angstrem (without T) - Angstrem is just an old Soviet production, they made chips for Soviet calculators and the game "Just you wait" - if anyone is old enough to remember it, there is a wolf eggs from under chickens caught. Angstrem is still alive and producing products (of course, not for calculators).
The history of Angstrem-T began in 2007, when Global Foundries (then it was still the AMD factory - Fab36, Dresden), began the transition to 300 mm wafers and sold all equipment and technologies for 200 mm Angstrem-T: 130 nm (AMD Athlon level MP Thoroughbred) full process documentation with guaranteed yield and 90 nm - developed but not yet in mass production. At that time it was quite new technology. But then something went wrong. The equipment got stuck in a warehouse in Rotterdam, and when I came to work for Global Foundries in 2011, it was already the talk of the town - how they sold the equipment to a Russian company, but instead of being used, it has been rotting in the warehouse for 4 years. It rotted somewhere else until 2014, after which it nevertheless arrived in Russia. A plant was built in Zelenograd, almost an exact copy of Dresden, they even built their own power plant to buy gas instead of electricity and generate electricity on their own so as not to depend on power outages. The same was done in Dresden, however, the Germans managed to turn off the electricity at the plant themselves (just in time for me) - but that's another story.
So, the plant was built, the equipment was delivered, I was there and experienced deja vu after Dresden - everything is exactly the same, installations in the same places, with the same code names.
That is, everything looked more or less normal there, but there is some strange story with the leadership there. I have a whole collection of business cards of the general directors of Angstrem-T of the same design, only the names are different - they changed there constantly (along with the whole team). Once I talked with one of the deputies, he asked me how quality control is arranged, I told him, he started laughing and said that I did not understand anything about quality control. Well, our quality control is organized according to the same principles by which I made modem chips for Qualcomm for the fifth iPhones in Germany, Apple did not seem to complain about the quality. So I shrugged my shoulders but didn't argue. Once again, I talked with VP sales ASML, he was interested in how Angstrem-T was doing and said that since their scanners had been in stock for 7 years, it would be very difficult to launch them and offered to trade-in the old scanners, and put newer ones in Angstrem-T with an additional charge. I retold this conversation to the management of Angstrem-T and said that in my opinion this is a good option - they will get a quick result of better quality, albeit for extra money. The management of Angstrem-T said that they did not know anything about this proposal. Strange, I thought, some left-wing dude like me knows, but those who were offered this and for whom it should be important - do not.
As a result, 15 years have passed since the purchase of the line, and production is still not working. Whether it will ever work, I don't know. The company is currently bankrupt.
Crocus nanoelectronics
The original idea of Crocus is the production of MRAM - magnetoresistive memory. I will not go into details, in short - you get non-volatile memory (like on flash drives) that runs at the speed of RAM (like DRAM). A lot of people are salivating from this combination, so many have tried to make it (I know about Sony and Infineon for sure). The problem turned out to be that theoretically everything is beautiful, but in reality it didn’t work out very well, more precisely, it turned out, but the speed turned out to be at the level of ordinary flash memory, and flash memory is already there, why bother with another technology for what is already great working?
But, before it became clear, Rusnano decided to invest in a 300 mm factory using a 65 nm process technology in Russia. You can be ironic about Rosnano as you like, but at the moment this is the only factory in Russia on 300 mm wafers with a working 65 nm technology. True, there is a nuance.
In the original model, it was assumed that MRAM cells would be manufactured at metallization levels (the so-called back end). Since the transistors themselves (front end) can be made at any factory, this is an easily accessible product, it was decided not to spend money on a full-cycle factory, but to build a part of the factory that will contain only know-how for manufacturing MRAM. I note, by the way, that the equipment for the front end is much more expensive (there is just more of it there, but for the back end, in principle, you don’t need a lot). So the original model looked like this:
Build a semi-factory (back-end only) for reasonable money
Buy c front end wafers for little money on the world market
Add MRAM back-end
Sell for big money on the world market
PROFIT!
If MRAM technology worked, it would be a very beautiful solution. But it did not work (and not only with Crocus), and Crocus turned into a kind of suitcase without a handle.
On the one hand, it is not a full-fledged factory, since it does not make transistors (front end), and it makes no sense to order a front end at a foreign factory and then finish it at home, it’s easier to immediately order a full cycle at a foreign factory. If they refuse you in the full cycle, then they will refuse you in half of the cycle.
On the other hand, this is the only production facility in Russia operating on 300 mm wafers according to a 65 nm process technology, with the possibility of further upgrading to 45 nm and, perhaps, up to 32 nm.
That is, it is a pity to kill, and it is not clear what to do next. Build up to a full factory? But this is a huge investment, and there is not much space there physically for a full factory. That is, it must be transferred. And if you transfer - isn't it easier to build from scratch then? (usually easier). And to go bankrupt - the hand does not rise.
The annual turnover of Crocus is about a billion rubles, they themselves earned ten percent (mostly one-time orders for the deposition of magnetic materials for foreign customers - there are no Russian ones, since there are no 300 mm factories in Russia).
As a result, after long ordeals, Rosnano sold Crocus to one large state corporation. They will make quantum computers there. Don't ask me what that means.
New plant in Zelenograd
Little is known about him. Wafer size 300 mm, manufacturing process 65 nm - 45 nm (First generation Intel Core i3, i5 and i7). It was planned to build it for a long time, for example, the news (of unknown date) that they should be built by 2014. The Sitronics company was going to build, but nothing intelligible can be googled. A few years ago, the government sent me a technical assignment for the plant for examination, I read it - it was written correctly, clearly written by people who knew what they were doing. According to rumors, construction is underway, with the involvement of Chinese contractors (like UMC - however, this is Taiwan). I can't say anything more. What will come of this is also not clear.
Outcome
On Micron, it is theoretically possible to produce something of the level of Intel Celeron / AMD Athlon 64 (90 nm manufacturing process, mid-2000s). To move on, you need a 300 mm winding, and it is not in a fully functional state.
Is it possible to completely localize the production of microelectronics according to a modern technical process?
Short answer: no.
More detailed answer: Not a single country in the world will be able to localize the production of microelectronics according to the technical process of less than 90 nm. It is still possible to establish something like micron technology (contact lithography, liquid etching, manual operations) on the knee, but it will be the level of 8086/80286 or ZX Spectrum.
Detailed response. Successful microelectronic manufacturing requires the following factors:
Existence of a sales market
Availability of production equipment
Availability of competent personnel
Availability of raw materials, materials and consumables
Let's take a look at each aspect in more detail.
Sales markets
It would seem, what sales markets - if you need to do it, then you need to, regardless of the costs. The problem is that the semiconductor plant itself is just the tip of the iceberg. And regardless of the costs, you will have to saw the whole iceberg, and this is a lot of money.
Everyone is used to the fact that semiconductor chips are very cheap. Why they are cheap, I wrote in another article. Many mistakenly believe that it is enough to put a plant in Russia and we will get the same cheap chips, only produced at home. Unfortunately, this is not so. A semiconductor factory eats up a huge amount of money, whether it produces something or not. That is, in order for one chip to be cheap, you need to divide this huge amount of money into a huge number of chips (tens of millions for a medium-sized plant). And they need to be sold somewhere. If there is nowhere to sell them (the Russian market is not so big), then the plant will incur losses, which must either be covered by the state with subsidies (then the chips will be cheap for the consumer), or by the consumers themselves (then the chips will be very expensive). I.e,
The next layer of the iceberg is hardware. The plant needs about a dozen installations of the same type (for example, lithography, or etching), and there are dozens (if not hundreds) of such types. A manufacturer of equipment of one type is not interested in a market of ten pieces - again, either the equipment will be gold for the plant, or the equipment manufacturer should be subsidized by the state. Or there should be a lot of factories, then the equipment manufacturer has a sales market and its products become cheaper. But we don’t need many factories - we don’t know what to do with the chips with one. That is, if you want to make relatively inexpensive equipment (relatively inexpensive - this means that, for example, a photolithography installation costs about the same as a Boeing), you need to sell it all over the world.
The next layer of the iceberg is equipment components - electronics, pumps, robots, etc. Here the same story - for tens / hundreds of pieces of equipment, many pumps are not needed, and again we run into either high cost or the need to sell on the world market.
And the same story will be with everything else: with silicon wafers, chemicals, water treatment systems. Everything that will be unique for our production will be wildly expensive, since we will not sell it to anyone else (well, or we trade with the whole world).
One more moment. One plant cannot produce the entire microelectronic range. That is, processors, and RAM, and flash memory, and microcontrollers and radio modems, etc. etc. do not squeeze into one plant. The production of RAM is generally a separate branch of microelectronics with separate factories, technical processes and players. At one time, the Germans tried to play this game, Infineon spun off the company Qimonda, which was supposed to be engaged in the production of RAM. Did not work out. The cost price of a memory chip produced by Qimonda was equal to the cost of a Samsung memory chip on the counter in a store. Qimonda went bankrupt.
That is, to have a fully localized production, you need to have several factories. And somewhere to sell the products of these factories. Or keep these plants working with a minimum load. In fairness, I note that many factories will create at least some demand for equipment and raw materials.
Let's roughly estimate how much it costs. For example, Intel is building a new plant in Germany for $17 billion. We need several factories, let's say it will be $50-60 billion. For comparison, this is defense spending in Russia in 2020. The entire ecosystem, I think, will cost at least an order of magnitude more, that is, $500-600 billion. This is already a third of GDP Russia. But such an ecosystem can cost more than an order of magnitude.
As a result, creating and maintaining a fully localized production is VERY expensive.
Production equipment
Let's say we found quadruplions of money somewhere and we can afford everything. The first thing you need is equipment. I note that at the moment there is not a single country in the world that would produce all the equipment necessary for microelectronic production using technologies of 45 nm and below. Even the US, which produces the lion's share of semiconductor equipment, does not produce photolithography machines. They are produced either by the Netherlands (ASML) or Japan (Nikon, Canon). Applied Materials (USA), one of the largest (maybe the largest) equipment manufacturer, usually boasts that they can supply a full line of equipment only from their machines, but always adds: except for photolithography.
It is very difficult to make equipment for modern semiconductor production, and it is impossible to do it yourself from scratch. There are two points here.
Firstly, modern equipment manufacturers have come a long way in decades by improving and improving their equipment. For example, the Dutch manufacturer of photolithographic equipment, ASML, spent about 15 years to perfect the EUV installation. The first prototype was delivered to IMEC (where I was then working) in the early 2000s, and it entered the market a few years ago (I don't know yet how long it took them to make the first prototype). This is despite the fact that ASML has vast experience in the development and production of photolithography machines and their R&D budget is in the order of a billion euros per year (I think the lion's share of this budget has gone and goes to EUV).
Secondly, modern equipment is actually a Lego constructor, in which 90% of the blocks are standard (robots, vacuum pumps, gas flow controllers, etc., etc.) and 10% is the know-how of the company, for which and spend most of the time and money in development. As far as I know, semiconductor equipment components of the required quality are not produced in Russia.
You can, of course, try to do everything yourself - but this is just one of the reasons why our parent company Mapper Lithography went bust: they tried to do everything themselves: power supplies, RF generators, write their own software, etc. As a result, the machine worked for an hour, then broke down and was repaired for a week.
You also need to remember that in addition to production equipment, auxiliary equipment is needed: water treatment systems (and this is not a filter to put in the kitchen), compressed air compressors, nitrogen generators, etc. etc. All this also needs to be taken somewhere, now this equipment is all imported.
Conclusion: you can try to do something if you have access to high quality standard components, if you also make the components yourself, then in my opinion, this is impossible. Plus, what I wrote in the section about sales markets, even if you make equipment, then to whom to sell, to one plant? But, although you can try to sell to China - there are many factories there.
Competent staff
This seems to be the least of the problems, but there is a nuance. In principle, Russian universities graduate a sufficient number of specialists who, after several years of training, are quite capable of working in modern production. This is confirmed both by the experience of our company and by the fact that many specialists of Russian origin work in foreign semiconductor industries (I myself worked there, and I know many Russians who work).
Now about the nuances: firstly, specialists need to be trained, home-grown specialists turn out badly, especially in the field of production culture and quality management. In my experience, quality is a headache for Russian companies. Everyone can rivet analogues in a single copy, but few people can deliver products of sustainable quality. If there is a management / leading engineers with foreign experience, it is not difficult to establish quality management, but for purely Russian companies it does not work well. Remember how I wrote above that the production management of Angstrem-T laughed at our quality management system? This is just about that. In general, foreign (either expats or Russians with foreign experience, like me) specialists can come and teach, the question is how to lure them now?
The second nuance: as soon as process engineers become more or less experienced specialists (several years of experience in normal production), they immediately begin to look abroad. A process engineer in semiconductor production in Europe receives 3-4 thousand euros per hand (to understand the level of expenses, I will give Dresden as an example: renting a 3-room apartment 700-800 euros, food 200-250 euros per person, clothes one and a half times cheaper, than in Moscow). As a result, there is a constant drain of personnel, since process engineers are always needed abroad (although not as urgently as IT specialists), and, unfortunately, we cannot afford to pay as abroad.
As a result, for our hypothetical plant, we must invite foreign specialists with their control technologies, and then keep our specialists from emigrating.
Raw materials
For the operation of the plant, we need silicon wafers, liquid chemicals (especially photoresist), gases, all small things (such as gloves, masks, tweezers, etc.). And all this is not of any quality, but of a very high degree of purification, small things compatible with clean rooms, etc. With all this, the situation in Russia is not exactly rosy. An interesting example with masks. When covid started, our supplier of masks (special for clean rooms, ordinary medical masks are not suitable there) said that they had thrown all their power into medical masks and now there will be no special ones. I had to invent reusable ones and wash them. In Russia, such masks are not produced.
We tried to work with a domestic photoresist. Either bubbles, or debris, or it doesn’t stick to the plate. Each batch is different from the previous one, it was necessary to adjust the process parameters for a new batch each time. Came into disrepair two months before the expiration date (sometimes, and sometimes even after the expiration date was normal). In general, we played roulette for about a year, switched to American. We set up the process once and forgot about the problems. And it was a micron size photoresist. I don't know how things are with Russian photoresist on technology less than 65 nm.
silicon wafers. There is a wonderful Russian company that produces them. The nomenclature is not very large, but there are the most popular sizes. Good quality. But, as usual, there is a nuance. The wafers are cut from imported silicon ingots, on imported equipment using imported consumables (the stock of which, as we were told for two months, there are no new deliveries yet). That is, if we want a fully localized production, we need to establish the production of ingots (for this, we also need to develop and produce equipment), the production of machines for cutting, grinding and polishing and consumables for them.
Photomasks. In Russia, there is the production of photomasks for older technologies (definitely not for 45 nm and below), and, of course, on imported glasses and imported equipment. The production of modern photomasks is also a whole industry, there are not so many manufacturers in the world (one of the examples is AMTC in Dresden). They also need equipment, raw materials, and so on. etc.
conclusions
You can't just take and build a plant for the production of microelectronics. Such a plant needs a huge ecosystem (consumers (many consumers), equipment, raw materials and materials, personnel). Recently there was a translated article about such an ecosystem. Moreover, this ecosystem is very fragile, if at least one component disappears, the entire system collapses. In my opinion, it is impossible to create such an ecosystem completely isolated from the outside world.
So, what is next?
Short answer: I don't know.
How could it look like? When integrating into the global microelectronic ecosystem (having the opportunity to buy equipment, raw materials and materials and the ability to sell products), choose a niche in which there is no fierce competition (as in the production of memory and processors) and try to take your share there by playing at lower labor costs and unique system solutions of intelligent local engineers. For example, in the field of RF microelectronics. As far as I know, the already mentioned Angstrem-T has (were?) Good developments in such areas, and they could be in demand in IoT, which is growing at a fairly rapid pace. Well, or some power integrated electronics. Or integrated photonics. With a couple of high-tech factories built into the global ecosystem, you can already do some things that you don’t want others to see.
Behind the iron curtain (meaning full localization from start to finish) you can only do something like 80286 processors for a lot of money, nothing more. I think that globalization is happening because it is impossible to advance above a certain technological limit alone - no country can pull it off, only the whole world. Whether we will be a part of this world is a separate question.
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