Russian Electronics: Semiconductor and Processors

lancelot wrote:TSMC

I don't know anything about chips. I had a friend in the precision concrete business and he said that chip mfg'ing has the lowest tolerances. If you pour a floor in a chip plant, it has to be flat with no tolerances.  Or something. I don't remember the convo very well.

I guess its all about precision ?  Russia is good at making rockets and nuclear power plants. Both involve precision. I just thought it would be doable for Russia. In a way that it wouldn't be doable for say Turkey, Brazil , India or any of those middle countries. Russia got the bomb in the 50's ffs.

China should have plowed all the money that they put into building Huawei into building chip mfg. Instead of being just another phone mfg'er. Todays phones are all packed with monopoly components. Not just the chips. And the only difference is the marketing strategy.

...And when they lost access to the old supply chain of (USSR-developed, BTW) marine and helicopter turbines from nowadays Ukraine, that was the death knell.

Nobody makes everything they use, and Russia is in a worse position than most... who could care less if Denmark does not have an AWACS platforms, or their inflight refueling tanker aircraft is a little light on air frames...

Russia is relatively self sufficient in its military needs... it was self sufficient in its military needs when the Warsaw Pact existed, but then that broke up so Russia needed to fill the gaps that created by developing its own jet trainer aircraft and light helicopters to fill the gap left by the Mi-2 production and L39 production in eastern europe. Again when the Soviet Union broke up its source of a lot of equipment and materials suddenly had to be paid for in US dollars because it became Ukrainian instead of Soviet... and eventually that supply chain was cut off.

It wasn't the death knell of anything except those countries that decided to cut Russia off lost their major customer and have struggled ever since.

Russia was in no position to make everything for itself in the 1990s or the 2000s... in the 2020s they are in a much better position... the make their own food, they make their own 5th gen fighters and machine tools and soon their own electronics will start to include consumer electronics in reasonable volumes too.

The point is that if they had cut the Ukraine out of their supply chain in 1991 the US and EU could have started poisoning their brains back then and by now Russia would not be what it is now because of the extra drain of designing new helicopter engines and aircraft engines and transport plane engines and ship engines etc etc they would be further behind in other areas that they funded instead.

Equally the hostile measure of cutting off the Ukraine would likely have meant pushing Ukraine away and being even more hostile now, which would have broken a lot of families that are managing to remain together.

Namely a quite simple aviation piston engine in the 100hp class. Nobody was manufacturing that particular type of engine domestically. It was always convenient and logical to go for existing off-the-shelf products, in that case a Japanese one IIRC.
p

But western corruption makes things worse... when a European car company comes in a buys up a percentage of a Russian car company then they start buying european products in preference to local products, because they have contracts with these euro companies or they buy in bulk and get a discount... a discount that is bound to disappear over time anyway.

It is easy to bribe the head of a Russian airline to lease western airliners and effectively stifle the Russian civilian airliner industry and nobody gives it a second thought... and if you get found out you can say that there was no Russian civilian airliner available ready to go when we made the decision to buy so we had to go with Boeing or Airbus, but if you are not working with Russian aircraft makers and there is no chance of airliner purchases then how are new Russian planes going to get built and developed.

Well thanks to the US, that is not a problem and the number of fields that is not going to be a problem any more will only expand over time.

Russia does not need to make everything for itself... that would be inefficient, but for things that are strategically important or scalable like engines and motors and power systems they should develop families of designs that can be extended when needed for other jobs.

There are lots of less critical things they could buy from overseas, but it would be best if they had several unrelated suppliers, because that means competition and choice... perhaps the cheapest if they are not too dreadful, and the best quality, so you have good enough when good enough is good enough and the best when it is more important and has to work.

Obviously Russia can build aviation piston engines, and are doing so, just not in that particular niche. So that became an issue.

Every country on the planet has gaps in their ranges of stuff and would struggle to fill a gap in a hurry... the easiest solution is to take a more powerful motor and derate it, or use two engines that are half the size you need instead of one.

For the last 20 years Russia has been importing engines from all over the world, but the western world and the Ukraine have slammed that door shut... some engines will be worth developing for themselves, while others they could probably buy from India or China or Brazil or South Africa... we are talking about a small motor... not a particle collider...

As we have seen from the situation with the Yak-152 and its engine... the Germans essentially bought Russian engine technology and claimed it for themselves... it is a Russian design but made in Germany... well with the gas being turned off eventually probably not for much longer...

Re semiconductors, they're no slouches there but it's a highly underdeveloped industry in Russia when it comes to manufacture, especially considering to how good they are at development (on paper) and so on. They won't be able to compete with the market leaders in decades, if ever.

That is funny, because 25 years ago they were 30 years behind in thermal imagers and going nowhere... in the early 2000s they wanted thermals for tanks and vehicles and SAM systems and rifle scopes and the only place they could look was foreign countries... they looked at Swedish and French and South African thermals and eventually bought French models and then started making them themselves and pretty soon their thermals were world class products... their armoured vehicles have thermals operating in three frequency ranges, including short wave systems that can see through water and glass and quite a few other materials too.

Russia does not need to be a market leader, they have needs which can be satisfied in terms of military needs... and it seems they already manage to meet those needs, but future needs include consumer devices and probably high end equipment like those needed for encryption and high volume data processing like sub hunting and looking for stealth targets in radar data...

They can buy from China and probably South Korea too, and if they decide to play the war game then they have some aces up their sleeve like a firm grasp of the neon supply and other materials the chip industry needs too.

If I am not mistaken, things like the F-22 Raptor run on Intel 286 tech (which is essentially from 1982) and was designed using equipment running it as well. It is still considered the premier air dominance fighter in the world, right.

My understanding is that 486 chips are used... I remember discussing this very topic in the 1990s with US fanboys claiming the new pentiums are going to really kick ass and that is why the F-22 is the best plane in the universe...

Obviously targeting pods and things that require high band width datalinks for video streams have custom chips and hardware, but the network on the F-22 will be 486 based.

from inside the building site .... this time

Angstrem plant is still "up" and visible
but comments suggest this author thinks it will be demolished too ...

Construction of the so-called "28 nm factory" in Zelenograd, new photos!
https://zen.yandex.ru/media/electromozg/stroitelstvo-tn-fabriki-28-nm-v-zelenograde-novye-fotki-62af47c590520a318726e10a?&

4x huge cranes for a medium sized 3-storey building ? ....
a lot more is going to happen on this site you would think in the not so distant future

Scorpius wrote:Just recently I read an article (unfortunately, the link has already been lost), where one of the representatives of Russian microelectronics plants said that one of the ways to solve the shortage could be the development of optimized circuits for older technical processes: in some cases, well-optimized chips executed on 250+ nanometer technology work just as well as those which are executed on 65 or 90 nanometer technology. Therefore, one of the solutions is the development of optimized chips based on older technological processes that have already been mastered on fully Russian equipment. Thus, more money and industrial capacity can be allocated for more responsible systems.

To target 250nm is a waste of time. Russia can produce 180nm and 90nm chips perfectly well at Mikron and Angstrem-T fabs.
3000 wafers per month at Mikron and 15000 wafers per month at Angstrem-T.
Unless you need a really large I/O section for whatever reason, because of the chip package and the connections to the pins, it makes more sense to use smaller process to better use available wafers for maximum chip production output and most transistors for the buck. So you might use the 250nm for things like credit card chips i.e. smart cards, you know, the ones with huge I/O contacts, but not regular ICs.

Russia has loads, and I mean loads, of designs of chips for 90nm process. DSPs, CPUs, including rad-hard ones. If those were sourced abroad but they would be of use then the design can be ported over to Russian fab processes. I know some already were being made in Zelenograd. 32-bit MIPS architecture chips. Elbrus dual core chips. ELVEES Risc32 chips with DSPs. There is also some new fangled stuff like RISC-V chips for microcontrollers also made at Zelenograd. It was posted in this forum before.

With regards to that construction work.

I sure hope they won't tear down the Angstrem-T fab. It makes no sense. They finished building the damn thing and inaugurated it in 2016. There are factories over a decade older than that in current operation elsewhere in the world and they are fully loaded today building chips for automotive and industrial control. It can on paper make 15000 wafers per month at 180nm or 90nm. This is the fab equipment which made AMD's Athlon64 X2 dual core chips at Dresden. Can probably make over a million CPUs a year. Unless they really messed up with it somehow, despite taking a decade building it, this should be highly viable even today.

I suspect they planned breaking Angstrem-T apart (I mean it is in the plan) and spreading the tools to other facilities. I mean Mikron wants to double wafer output and is just on the other side of the village. But it all seems kind of nonsensical.

The older huge Soviet Angstrem fabs directly north of Angstrem-T. Those I know they tore them down. You can see it in satellite pictures. I don't know what they did with the Soviet era equipment. But it probably still would have had use for making discrete components or maybe power electronics.

Building the other facilities in the plan would make sense. The construction plan had process design labs and chip design center buildings. They could use the floor space for that. But the 28nm factory? Where will they get the tools? Unless they magically got them somewhere before the sanctions hit. And believe me the tools industry, at least for lithography, has a workload schedule where people order these things and then get put into a 2 year waiting list. It is that bad. 55nm tools are easier to come by. But still not trivial.

Russia could likely source quite a lot of the other tools somehow. Either used from someone else, or from Chinese vendors, or from whoever. As for the idea of Russia making their own tools. Look, I know Russia could make them if they wanted to, the lithography machines alone are all about lasers, precision lenses, and Russia has the industry. Most of the machines require high precision tools to make the necessary parts. Typically we are talking about 6-axis CNC machines with really high precision and things like that. Export controlled equipment. The inspection tools are basically electron microscopes with specialized software. Mask etching tools are electron beam direct writing tools. So if you think it is easy to make all this crap. No. It isn't. I am not saying Russia does not have the skills. Just that it would be way easier to just buy what they can and focus on making the rest. For example they could easily buy crystal furnaces in China if they wanted to and startup their industry. Heck, maybe they have some crystal furnaces already they can repurpose for making silicon crystals. Because last I heard Russia makes 150mm wafers but not 200mm ones for 90nm let alone 300mm ones for 28nm process. China manufactures wafers by the shit ton. They are the world's largest manufacturer of polysilicon (and the cheapest). That is the stuff used to make wafers. They have at least like 3 manufacturers of wafers that I can remember. So it is not like that would be the pressing matter. Believe me.

I do not understand this construction plan. But I sure hope they know what they are doing. Like I said, my expectation is they will just build the offices for design work, the laboratories for process engineering, and leave the fabs for later after they get the equipment. Just putting that Angstrem-T fab making chips to make digital radios for the army, since Mikron seems to be producing them at a snail's pace, and microcontrollers for automobiles (most of their patents already expired), would probably keep that fab busy for the next couple of years. So there is no need to be that creative to find uses for it.

that "28nm factory" .... its multi-storey
so it probably will house some trial build equipment at best
looks like a "skunkworks"
where you have all your various designers and production people working "concurrently" - upstairs
maybe with windows looking downwards on the inside to the "shopfloor" below
I saw a place like that once .... think it was Fisher & Paykel in NZ ?

yeah that Angstrem building doesn't look that old
but maybe the intention is to build a "perfect" site setup
and then that can be replicated elsewhere ... over near the Urals would make a lot of sense re security

but it does seem to reek of a "showcase" establishment where "bright young things" will want to work and be "seen" at ....

Silicon
The aluminium industry uses a lot of silicon ...
Rusal would have furnaces already - that may already meet the spec
maybe another stage of refinement might be needed ?
Rusal is huge

You use the furnaces to make polysilicon from the raw ore which is silica sand. This polysilicon has a disordered crystalline structure. Then you have to melt the polysilicon in a crucible and use the Czochralski technique to make a silicon ingot. Basically a huge silicon monocrystal. This ingot then needs to be cut accurately with minimum imperfections into wafers. The lower the resolution process you will use in the chips the lower the imperfections in the wafer must be. The wafers are then polished.

Gazputin wrote:that "28nm factory" .... its multi-storey
so it probably will house some trial build equipment at best
looks like a "skunkworks"
where you have all your various designers and production people working "concurrently" - upstairs
maybe with windows looking downwards on the inside to the "shopfloor" below
I saw a place like that once .... think it was Fisher & Paykel in NZ ?

yeah that Angstrem building doesn't look that old
but maybe the intention is to build a "perfect" site setup
and then that can be replicated elsewhere ... over near the Urals would make a lot of sense re security

but it does seem to reek of a "showcase" establishment where "bright young things" will want to work and be "seen" at ....

Silicon
The aluminium industry uses a lot of silicon ...
Rusal would have furnaces already  - that may already meet the spec
maybe another stage of refinement might be needed ?
Rusal is huge

According to article this will be scientific education complex with experimental production (научно-образовательного корпуса с площадями для опытного производства). Not full fledged factory. More like design center with low scale production.
As for Angstrem-T article says that it will be reconstructed for new production. I read it like adapted and incorporated into new compound, but not completely demolished. But, this is just a guesswork.

sepheronx wrote:
Does VTB still own the rights to angstrem t or was it handed over to rostec?

Yes, Rostec is the owner now.

As for development of electronics, i would like to see them to start using 300mm wafers and then optimize 65 and 90nm ICs that Mikron can do atm.

lancelot wrote:.

To target 250nm is a waste of time. Russia can produce 180nm and 90nm chips perfectly well at Mikron and Angstrem-T fabs.
it.

[/quote]

I read somewhere that even Belarus is mfg'ing 250 nm now.

Such a strange industry. I've been reading up on it. Lots of companies can design their own chips. But basically one company can mfg them in Taiwan. And one company in the Netherlands can build the machines that make the chips.

I think a lot of the confusion is to do with the difference between high performance CPUs and general purpose type CPUs for controllers etc

eg RISC-V chips
most applications to date are for general purpose controllers

Taiwan's rise is almost exactly paralleled by the growth of smartphone sales around the world
and the rise of the fabless guys Qualcomm, AMD, Apple ....

but as a lot of much better informed guys on this thread had said often
28nm and its offspring 14nm will dominate general purpose applications for decades
not all this hype about 7nm and 3nm ...

and bigger 100-250nm stuff is preferred in cars, planes, space, military due to durability and less prone to heat and radiation
so they are here to stay too ...

why I think Taiwan and South Korea are frantically trying to move most of their business into the sub-14nm market
because they both know once China perfects its own 28nm production equipment
they are going to obliterate them in the dominant general purpose CPU areas ... sure as day follows night

business model for CPU production - is a high capital intensive setup cost and a modest marginal cost - say 80-20 split
cars for instance are quite different
pretty big capital cost ... but the ongoing marginal cost per unit is the daily battle - more like 50-50 split
and your local bakery would be something more like 20-80 split
capital vs marginal cost

why most of your family businesses are bakeries etc .... relatively small barriers to entry
whereas your high capital cost industries have huge barriers to entry .... CPUs .... airliners ....
cars have significant barriers to entry ... but not as daunting

hope that makes sense .... haven't had my morning coffee yet

but yeah geo-strategically
the "West" is desperately trying to keep the "high performance" sub 14nm CPU production to themselves
as they know the 14-28nm stuff ..... China will get it figured out soon
in fact as far as I can tell they are letting China have as many ASML 28nm machines as they like
in a hope of that will slow down Chinese demand for domestically made 28nm machines

China will of course play the long and short game concurrently .... as it always does

@Gazputin
Good thing would be if Russia could import some of the 28nm machines via gray channels from China. That would speeden up development of their own equipment.
But i will continue to pound the table on 300mm wafers. This is what Russia needs to lower  production costs.

Not sure if this was posted yet.

About chip production and imported equipment

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian condemned the US for pushing a Dutch company to stop selling chip-making equipment to China, calling US stocks a typical example of "tech terrorism". https://t.me/valdaiclub/11344

kvs wrote:Another sample of Asianometry excrement is the "Why Soviet computers failed" video.

did anyone play shooter games on Elbrus in Soviet times huh? where superior cavillation form US is always winning? No then USSSR computers failed. BTW tey failed also in robotics, I wish I had Russian source but USSR had up to 100,000indurtiel robots at end of 80s...

The clown behind Asianometry is one of those wunderwaffen retards who will claim that all German military equipment was
vastly superior to anything the USSR produced.

because they were superior !  tanks - superior in number of hours spent on production and costs!  they were like 3 times so expensive!

Let retards like him and other NATzO circle jerking fanbois keep believing in Russian inferiority.  That is a clear sign of their
own inferiority.

sorry Russia is inferior in warfare, daily peremoga reports in Ukraine just confirm that! And each and every bowels  
Azov evacuation or run for your life tactical retreat is just proof of that NATO directing Ukroorcs is superior.

Rogozin proposed to nationalize the production of space microelectronics

07/05/2022 17:00:52
Moscow. 5'th of July. Interfax - The head of Roskosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, proposed nationalizing enterprises producing microelectronics for satellites, transferring them to Roskosmos and Rosatom.
"The topic of satellite construction in our country remains one of the most alarming precisely because of the inaccessibility of the radiation-resistant element base. Therefore, I would propose to nationalize this industry and transfer it to the jurisdiction of Roskosmos and Rosatom," said Rogozin, whose words are quoted in the message of the state corporation
Roskosmos reported that Rogozin at a meeting with the staff of the satellite-building holding "Information Satellite Systems" named after .
"You will have a lot of work. The only question is the technical feasibility of those areas of activity that we do not have on hand - the same element base. This is our weak point. We need to sit down together and think about how to solve the problem," Rogozin said.
On March 15, Rogozin announced that Roskosmos had acquired a stake in PJSC Yaroslavl Radio Plant from AFK Sistema and included it in its space instrumentation holding Russian Space Systems.
On February 26, the head of Roscosmos announced that the state corporation would be able to purchase components for satellites from China, the supply of which would be limited by sanctions.
In June 2021, Rogozin said that US sanctions restricting the supply of microelectronics affected dozens of Russian spacecraft. He also added that due to the sanctions, the launch of a number of satellites is being disrupted.
The first deputy general director of the state corporation for economics and finance, Maxim Ovchinnikov, in an interview with Interfax reported that Roscosmos was faced with the refusal of some companies to supply components. He also said that Roskosmos is unable to complete a number of government contracts on time due to limited access to critical technologies caused by US sanctions.
According to him, this "has a negative impact on the economy of the enterprise and the economy of the corporation as a whole."

https://www.militarynews.ru/story.asp?rid=1&nid=577501&lang=RU

Rodion_Romanovic wrote:About chip production and imported equipment

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian condemned the US for pushing a Dutch company to stop selling chip-making equipment to China, calling US stocks a typical example of "tech terrorism".  https://t.me/valdaiclub/11344

That is the best proof China and Russia should join forces in chip making equipment production. At least till all new spheres of influence will be established,

kvs wrote:

I should have been more clear.   Currently high resolution IC production is offshored.   Russia is transitioning to 28 nm and smaller process manufacturing.
By 2030 I think they will have 14 nm equipment domestically produced.    They basically financed projects that result in such EUV/X-ray equipment.  
Note that Russia is not starting from scratch so the projects are not pie in the sky.

In the next 10 years Russia needs to shop around where it can find such IC production capacity and that means China.   There are no other choices since
Taiwan is over and western fabs are no longer accessible.    This sort of pain is exactly what Russia needs to get going.   In fact, pain/coercion is the prime
motivator for biological systems which includes societies.  

Yes that's true, but why would it not be possible for Russia to make these IC? I understand the economical approach,

To have built cheap, and to make a profit for companies to be competitive

But is it not possible to do it domestically?

Even if the costs are higher, is there no way to localize the production and raise other benchmarks like wages and ultimately sales cost(to consumer) to compensate for the higher cost of production ?

At least to satisfy local demand, then once Russian chipmakers and hardware makers have control over the market, THEN they can offshore to export it to the other countries?

kvs wrote:I should have been more clear.   Currently high resolution IC production is offshored.   Russia is transitioning to 28 nm and smaller process manufacturing.
By 2030 I think they will have 14 nm equipment domestically produced.    They basically financed projects that result in such EUV/X-ray equipment.  
Note that Russia is not starting from scratch so the projects are not pie in the sky.

In the next 10 years Russia needs to shop around where it can find such IC production capacity and that means China.   There are no other choices since
Taiwan is over and western fabs are no longer accessible.    This sort of pain is exactly what Russia needs to get going.   In fact, pain/coercion is the prime
motivator for biological systems which includes societies.

Based on the current state of affairs, Taiwan in a way or another come to the Chinese control around 2025/2026, then this whole political situation will change.

Ever if not like that, this is almost certainly in the elections happening in 2024 (2025 government) will be won by the party which is pro-China.[1] The current pro-Japan (and Western) party won by a miracle in the last elections.

[1] there are two parties: pro-China; pro-Japan (and Western).