Russian Electronics: Semiconductor and Processors #2

Not really Russia but this seems the best place to post this. Similar to the sanctions on Russia, when the US started the chip war with China I doubt it expected this result.

Russia is getting exactly the sort of external pressure it needs to sort out its domestic semiconductor industry. It needs to avoid making China into a replacement
for the west.

Something the Europeans should take note of... afterall at US insistence the EU is blocking Russian gas supplies because being potentially under the thumb of Russia would be a risk... but they didn't really think things through properly because now they are at the whim of the market and still have to buy Russian gas but they pay rather more for it because they buy from third party customers. They are still dependent on Russian gas because that is where the gas comes from... they just get to pretend they are not dependent on Russian gas and they get to pay more.

With the chips the biggest market is China but Russia also uses a lot of chips so blocking their access to western produced chips is eliminating two significant customers... in the case of China a massive customer... and they are only going to end up making their own and they can probably make them cheaper and better than the west can because it will be new investments using new technologies, so they are essentially creating competition for themselves while at the same time removing two major customers off their order books.

Classy.

In 100 years historians will look back and not understand how the west can be so stupid in their hatred for Russia and China... and how much it cost them globally... they were sitting pretty and comfortable and they are blowing it.

It is also not an insignificant factor that the people they are up against... Putin and Xi are not idiots either and are clearly doing their jobs rather well which emphasises how wrong they are in the west.

Just look at media question time and some journalist asks HATO and EU politicians about who is going to win the US elections before the hillary trump election and they all opened their big mouths and said of course hillary is going to win... her experience and because she is a woman etc etc, so of course when Trump won he wasn't very nice to them and talked about ending HATO unless they started paying more for it...

When reporters asked Putin he said he didn't want to influence the vote by giving his opinion and that the decision was for the American voters and that he was prepared to work with whoever they chose to elect.

There was a time when that was normal, but now it is unusual.

It is funny.... through the years there are politicians in your own country that are thought of as rule breakers and radicals and you look at their old interviews now and realise how tame and boring everything actually was.

When there was a left wing... in the US the democrats and republicans are both right wing. Both are fully pro war...

The head of the Ministry of Industry and Trade is new, but the promises regarding lithographs are old.

By 2026, a lithograph for working on 130 nm topologies will be created in Russia; lasers for these devices are currently being developed within the country. This was announced by the new head of the Ministry of Industry and Trade Anton Alikhanov and he announced the next plans - to announce the next work in order to reach the 90-65 nm topology.

Last year we were already promised that in 2024 the production of lithographs with 350 nm topology will begin, and in 2026 - with 130 nm topologies. In early July, Denis Manturov reported that the equipment for the production of chips with 350 nm topology is already ready, but is only undergoing testing. It is difficult to say when it will reach production.

The world's leading manufacturing companies achieved 350 nm topology in 1995-1997, 130 nm topology in 2001, and only the 65 nm topology promised by Alikhanov was achieved 20 years ago, in 2004. Alas, the lag is catastrophic and it is practically impossible to reduce it, as well as the dependence on supplies of foreign microcircuits.

https://t.me/mash_tech/3278

This telegram channel is always dismal in its outlook on anything in Russia but my understanding is that Russia is doing a different approach to building lithography equipment.

They are, what I gathered, going back to the start. They have already made lithography equipment for 350nm tech. It's undergoing tests. What they will do is use it to jump to 130nm then to 65nm right after. They will mame jumps till they have caught up. Give about 5 years and they may have caught up or have moved onto something else for semiconductor production.

Any other new news from anyone else here?

The fact of the matter is that western chip makers made certain decisions and used specific technologies to do different things and the available materials and technology of the time limited their options.

For instance if you wanted to fly 200 years ago your choices were limited to hot air balloon... these days you have an enormous range of options... even the combustion motor from a motor mower can be used with a thin aerofoil parachute to go paragliding to fly at fairly low speed, but you are still flying...

As they go through the process of making chips in different size ranges... and these are useful chips that fill roles that are probably more useful for some devices than the super fast super expensive chips... as they make their own they might find new materials that gets the job done better or faster or just cheaper.

It is good for them to be making their own in facilities that will be far more sophisticated than the factories they might have used in the 1990s when these chips started production.

Since Western/ NATO electronics are now exposed as being LACED with Explosives, perhaps Russia can step in and capture NATO market share for electronic products like pagers

https://sdelanounas.ru/blogs/163097/?utm_source=tg

Report on Russia's 50-qubit quantum computer on ion traps

Scientists from the Lebedev Physical Institute and the Russian Quantum Center, with the support of Rosatom, have created a 50-qubit ion quantum computer. This was announced by the Director General of the State Atomic Energy Corporation Alexey Likhachev. This achievement means that Russia has become one of the leaders in the field of quantum technologies. This is reported in a television report by Anna Voronina from the series "Horizons of the Atom". https://smotrim.ru/video/2872732

Read more: https://sdelanounas.ru/blogs/163097/?utm_source=tg


This is actually big cause they jumped from like 15 or 20qbits late last year to 50. Sooner than later it will just keep increasing.

sepheronx wrote:They have already made lithography equipment for 350nm tech. It's undergoing tests.  What they will do is use it to jump to 130nm then to 65nm right after.  They will mame jumps till they have caught up. Give about 5 years and they may have caught up or have moved onto something else for semiconductor production.

Any other new news from anyone else here?

The 248nm wavelength laser is capable of manufacturing chips with 130nm transistors. While the 193nm laser is capable of manufacturing chips with 65nm transistors.

In addition to lasers and laser equipment for industry, LASSARD Group also develops excimer lasers and laser platforms for vision correction. We are the only ones in Russia who create such technologies independently. The production is located in Troitsk.
On September 18, Deputy Minister of Industry of the Russian Federation Vasily Shpak visited our site. He assessed the development of two powerful excimer lasers for lithography with wavelengths of 193 and 248 nm as part of the Progress 130 project. So far, only two companies in the world have mastered such technologies. We have already produced 2 samples: next year they will be sent for testing, and in 2026 they will go into serial production.

Serial production of powerful excimer lasers will help the development of domestic microelectronics. This issue is under the personal control of the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation.

We thank Vasily Viktorovich for the visit! We hope that the meeting was productive and next year we will demonstrate the results of the tests.

https://lassard.ru/ru/news/zamestitel-ministra

But even that can be solved if they make their own motherboards.

The PC design has a CPU, plus an onboard chipset called North Bridge and South Bridge... northbridge handles high speed stuff like memory and video cards, while south bridge handles slower stuff like I/O like floppy disk drives and Hard Drives etc etc.

If you are not getting super fast multicore tiny scale high speed chips you could simply convert the mother board to take more CPU chips and get extra cores that way.

Once CPUs got to about 3.4 GHz they stopped really getting any faster and were improved by making them multicore.... sometimes they even got slower... where a 3.4 GHz chip might be replaced with a 2.5GHz chip that has four cores, so while it has a slower clock speed, it can multithread jobs and effectively perform more tasks at one time, so if it is well programmed it actually appears to be even faster.

If they took the right people and got them working on it I am sure they could come up with a better desktop computer design that has more growth potential than just putting in faster RAM and faster CPUs and faster Graphics cards/chips.

Computers went from being building sized mainframes with average processing power but multiple terminals that switched between users so quickly the users thought they had the computer all to themselves, to desktop computers that are faster than those old mainframe computers.

For most business related work a desktop is not really used to its ability and actually designing all the computers in a company to work together as a hive mind for difficult jobs while multitasking to do what the desktop operator wants them to do could be an interesting way of better utilising the processing power of many machines.

Using multiple processors is a cheap way of creating super computers where older slower chips could be used in large numbers (because they were cheaper and their lower clock speed could be compensated for by sheer numbers and efficient programming that harnessed the massive parallel processing capacity of a large number of chips.

Of course most business related tasks don't need supercomputer levels of processing power most of the time.

I agree.

The best route I think would be to continue RISC V development and its Elbrus VLIW (or have Elbrus also look at RISC V/ARM development) and then concentrate on making an OS completely around the architecture. An alternative UNIX based one like how Oracle had theirs. They use a custom linux OS like Elbrus OS and Astra Linux but they have their limitations based upon what they were developed from Debian.

The bloat is to make the consumer continually buy newer shit.

Games for instance - they added ray tracing to hobble the performance of exceedingly powerful GPUs. Now you can't even run AAA games at native res and stable, high frame rates - you need upscaling and/or frame gen. Retarded. Especially when you'd be hard pressed to notice any improvement to graphical fidelity from games that were released on the PS4.

I remember my Amiga 500 computer came with two floppy disks with the entire operating system... now Amiga floppy disks were double sided and double density, but not High Density like the IBM disks... early disks were double sided 360K disks, and so double density double sided was 720K. They then went to High Density which double the capacity to 1.44MB per disk... but the Amiga never took that last step, but is formatting was different so it could get 880K on a 720K IBM PC disk. If they had implemented the HD format they would have been 1.76MB capacity disks.

The point I am trying to make is that the Amiga 500 had a GUI interface and was actually comparable to Windows... at a time when IBM PCs were list based interfaces or DOS.

The Amiga had two mouse buttons where the left button was select the right button was the menu button as used today.

At the time the IBM computers had three buttons but only the left button did anything, while Apples only had one button.

The Amiga introduced the WIMPS environment... Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers, and Screens. The main OS screen was called Workbench.

But the point I am trying to make is that the guts of the entire OS was 880K... if you create a Word Document these days and then save it without typing anything at all the file size is about 30K with all the formatting information it stores.

Making me a bit nostalgic really...

If the mine output is affected will this affect Russia? They had 70cm/30" of rain in under 2 days which swept away all the main access roads/bridges including the road mentioned.

In March, a Wharton professor who studies artificial intelligence and start-ups claimed on X, "The modern economy rests on a single road in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The road runs to the two mines that are the sole supplier of the quartz required to make the crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers."

Ethan Mollick noted at the time, "There are no alternative sources known" if supply disruptions were seen in Spruce Pines. https://x.com/emollick/status/1766504587781878196

Fast-forward to this past weekend across the Western North Carolina area, where a major disaster continues to unfold after tropical system Helene dumped torrential rains and unleashed devastating floods that pulverized entire towns, destroyed roads, highways, and bridges, and left tens of thousands without power.

................................

A 2018 note from Wired shows just how critical Spruce Pines area mines are for semiconductor production: "A fire in 2008 at one of the main quartz facilities in Spruce Pine for a time all but shut off the supply of high‑purity quartz to the world market, sending shivers through the industry."

Earlier this year, Tom's Hardware cited Mollick's X posts, saying the Wharton professor "provides an excerpt from Conway's Material World, which discusses the probable "end of computer chip manufacture as we know it," should something untoward happen at Spruce Pine or in the skies above it."

https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/modern-economy-rests-single-road-north-carolina-where-hurricane-collapsed-bridges

It is also possible to extract pure silica from rice husks.
https://patents.google.com/patent/CN1063087A/en

Along with development of modern science and technology, the demand of high-purity silicon dioxide is increased day by day. Studies show that dioxide-containing silica is up to about 20% in the rice husk, China produces about 4,000 ten thousand tons of rice husk per year, is converted to about 8,000,000 tons of silicon-dioxide annual production, ranks first in the world.

This uses low temperature chemical processes and should be pretty cost effective.

For comparison that Spruce Pine quartz mine is claimed to produce 180,000-200,000 tons annually.

If the mine output is affected will this affect Russia?

No.

This is a case of US reliance... no world reliance... the obvious counter would be if the US controlled something essential to make computer chips they would have banned its export to its enemies like Russia and China and Iran... and they didn't because those countries have their own sources of material that is mined there.