Russian Electronics: Semiconductor and Processors

limb wrote:So can Russia produce enough 65nm transistors to satisfy military and spacecraft demand?

How did you come up with 65nm? Why not 45nm or 90nm?

Mikron has 65 nm production capacity. Russia does not have 45 nm fabs.

People should stop treating military ICs like consumer products. A 90 nm IC is not some refrigerator CPU joke. Refrigerators
and washing machines have 6502 level ICs. OK, maybe the ultra fancy ones have more advanced parts. But 90 nm takes us
back to the early 2000s for Intel CPUs. Do you think that the early 2000s CPUs were total crap? The military does not need
a generic CPU using generic RAM. It needs ASICs and custom layouts of those ASICs.

A tank or jet aircraft does not need "7 nm" parts in tiny form factors. It also does not need 80 core CPUs for some sort of
neural network learning activity. Nobody, including the precious west, is going to deploy supercomputers in military equipment
to run AI systems. That is strictly offline activity. What is deployed on field equipment is a "hard wired" implementation of
the AI model. This does not require HPC hardware.

limb wrote:So can Russia produce enough 65nm transistors to satisfy military and spacecraft demand?

I doubt that military uses anything in 65nm. Maybe DSP, buy I'm very doubtful. As far as i know, space electronics is mostly made in 130nm tech. Space electronics needs to be rugged. Similar goes for military. What exactly they would need so much processing power for?

This is still not common knowledge and I see people talking about 5 nm process resolution with 2 nm in the near term as if it has any relation
to the resolution of 90 nm and coarser chips.   So called 5 nm FinFet is not 18 times smaller than 90 nm.   The channel "fin" was 5 nm before
but was not oriented at 90 degrees to the surface of the chip.   So the 5 nm tag is a total marketing lie.   I posted in the general thread
a video where a "7 nm" FinFet chip produced for AMD by TSMC is dissected with highly specialized equipment and viewed with an electron
microscope.   It is clearly not smaller than the 14 nm chips produced by Intel.  

So-called 28 nm is really more like 56 nm with assorted tech solutions to physics problems that appear below 90 nm.  For example strained
silicon in order to increase the electron speed in the channel.   So the electron travels 56 nm but twice as fast and this is called 28 nm.  
At 90 nm SiO2 was perfect for the oxide in CMOS.   For smaller channel "length" (the convention is opposite to the language used for channels
such as rivers and canals is the "width") between the positive and negative ends of a transistor the quantum tunneling increases rapidly with
decreasing "length".   To suppress this we have the transition to exotic oxides such as those based on Hafnium.  The idea is that the leakage
current can be suppressed by increasing the dielectric constant of the material.  HfO2 has a constant about 20 times larger than the vacuum compared
to SiO2 which has one 4 times larger.  But Hafnium introduces lattice defects which totally f*ck up the CMOS functionality so there are layered
applications of it, etc.

All modern high resolution IC tech is proprietary with different companies having their own secret solutions.   Back in the days of 90 nm moving
from company to company did not result in dealing with totally different technology.   People who think Russia lacks the ability to handle such
technology don't have a clue what they are talking about.   The understanding of the physics problems and how to solve them is clearly there
and Russian researchers are coming up with their own solutions.    Commercialization of these solutions is fully practical.   People keep on using
the USSR as some sort of absolute reference point.   The days of incompetent micromanagement are long over.   The issue is financial incentive
and that is now also not a problem thanks to the stellar intellects in NATzO.

https://iz.ru/1387915/2022-08-31/mishustin-poobeshchal-bespretcedentnoe-finansirovanie-elektroniki-v-rf

Mishustin promised unprecedented funding for electronics in Russia

Mishustin: Russia's electronics industry will receive unprecedented funding

August 31, 2022, 06:37

Funding for the development of the domestic electronics industry will be carried out in unprecedented volumes. This was announced on August 30 by Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin at a technological session on electronics.

“In the first half of the year, we held a strategic session, determined the prospective image of the electronics industry, outlined very specific goals and objectives for achieving them. The industry will receive unprecedented funding, and it is long - we have made plans for eight years, ”he said.

According to the prime minister, now we need to pay special attention to the development of our own specialized electronic engineering, the production of technological, auxiliary equipment, components, including through stimulating demand for microelectronic products.

The work should be carried out by the state together with the scientific community and represent the creation of knowledge-intensive products, services and ensuring the competitiveness of Russia in the field of high technologies.

In addition, Mishustin noted the need to fine-tune the financial system in the face of sanctions and restrictions. He emphasized the need to strengthen the financial self-sufficiency and independence of the Russian Federation, and also noted that now it is important to take medium-term measures aimed at restoring growth rates.

On August 19, the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation announced that domestic manufacturers are ready to offer their products to the Ministry of Emergency Situations . It was noted that the state supports production, in particular, benefits have been introduced for the radio-electronic industry in the form of reduced corporate income tax rates and insurance premium rates, which apply not only to developers, but also manufacturers of electronic components and electronic products.

Earlier, on August 15, Deputy Head of the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation Vasily Shpak, as part of the Army-2022 forum, said that some Russian state-owned companies and departments had already switched to domestic software at critical information infrastructure (CII) facilities. Russian experts have created a "security platform" that provides trusted platform security solutions for critical information infrastructure, he said.

Prior to this, on July 20, the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation announced that the government would speed up work on bringing Russian developments in the field of software to the Russian market.

The 65 nm is a variation of 90 nm. It is not likely to be a simple geometry difference. Below 90 nm there is a need for new materials and new
ways to deposit the oxide. So Mikron's 65 nm is likely a marketing term. They used the same equipment to implement it.

lancelot wrote: Angstrem-T would be converted to use Mikron production processes so it could supply orders like the increased demand for Mir payment card chips.

Russia needs lots of electronics besides military: cars/ electric cars power-dives, robots/drones, airplanes, ship avionics, satellites, computers... this requires many thousands per year outputs.

sepheronx wrote:

Apparently Rostec along with Mikron has dealt with the automotive industry issue.  At least last I read.  But that in itself probably then starts to eat up too much for production of their other chips.

And there are other companies as well. Mikron is just the largest in Russia.  GS Nanogroup is just another one now getting involved in expanding chip production in other fields beyond what they initially did.

in order to make unit cost smaller they need to tackle car industry. Depending on source average car has 50-100 chips. AutoVaz manufactured ~100,000cars in 2021. So whooping number of chips will be needed for cars alone.

Looking at their current capacity is not useful, because the market and situation has dramatically changed and they are under sanctions designed to damage them.

This means investment in new chip production makes sense... even the US is moving some chip production to the US because they know how vulnerable they are if they do manage to get a war to kick off in the Pacific between China and Taiwan which could cut them off from both chip makers.

Buying chips from China certainly makes sense but cars are just the beginning... moving forward buildings and houses are going to become more automated, and not just cars but all vehicles and aircraft too so having some safe reliable chips with no spy bullshit in them is valuable to the Russian state and the rest of the world.

More sophisticated chips in smaller numbers also make a lot of sense too, and production of those needs to be funded as well.

The point is that Russia is very good at new technology... after a gap, they seem to have caught up rather well in the field of weapons and making vaccines and space and ships... their biggest problem has been market size and competition from bigger companies from other countries who already supply large markets and they can take a loss to take out any fledgling Russian competition in the Russian market.

Well now western governments have decided to give Russian companies some breathing and growing space and they need to take advantage of that... not just produce your own but work on the technology... improve it... don't just blindly copy and replicate... I am sure they can make it cheaper and easier to mass produce in useful volumes.

The expert called the way to quickly master the production of the most modern microcircuits in Russia, by Tatyana Kosolapova for VZGLYAD. 09.13.2022.

“It is necessary to lure people from abroad, and in ready-made teams. So we can peep and learn ourselves,” tech blogger Maxim Gorshenin told the VZGLYAD newspaper, commenting on the acute shortage of qualified specialists in the development and production of Russian microelectronics.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation has prepared an updated concept for the development of Russian microelectronics until 2030 in order to correct the main problems of the industry, Kommersant reports . The document notes that the industry has a lot of problems, in particular, technologies are lagging behind the world level by 10-15 years, there is dependence on foreign technologies, and there is also an acute shortage of qualified personnel.

“Now in Russia there are two more or less well-known advanced factories: Mikron and Angstrem, which produce microcircuits of 180 nanometers. In order for us to have people who can set up the production of microcircuits of 3-5 nanometers, it is not enough to train specialists at the university. It is unlikely that there will be a jump from 180 to 5 nanometers,” says Gorshenin.

He notes that developments are already underway in Russia to create their own lithographic equipment for the microelectronic industry. However, according to the expert, it will not be possible to train Russians in such technologies without help from abroad, since there are no specialists of such qualification in the country.

“There is an option to invite from abroad. After all, there are a sufficient number of factories that own these technologies - in Taiwan, China, India, and European countries. And a few specialists will not help us. Here we need a well-coordinated team that will teach our people all the technologies,” the interlocutor argues.

Gorshenin says they can be motivated by benefits and attractive business conditions. For example, Russia could offer to open production with us, providing gas and electricity at prices 10 times lower than in Europe or other countries. This would greatly reduce the cost of production.

“We have educational institutions, specialists who could help to master all this, too, but not in sufficient numbers. In any case, we need to lure people from abroad, and in whole teams. So we can peep and learn for ourselves, ”concluded Gorshenin.

At the end of August, the head of the Ministry for the Development of the Far East, Alexei Chekunkov , said that in Vladivostok, on Russky Island, the production of microcircuits could appear, but not “super advanced”, at the level of three or four nanometers, but those used for cars (60 nanometers).

https://vz.ru/news/2022/9/13/1177365.html

The article is skewed. It makes it sound like there are no specialists in the production of such equipment at all. This is simply not true
and I already posted before on a small company which makes makes equipment that is essentially components of the manufacturing
equipment being developed.

As for using the equipment, what does Mikron use? Some monkeys on typewriters? I am sure that companies which have been
contracted to make 90 nm and smaller IC lithography equipment by 2030 can design interfaces similar to those of existing equipment
imported from the west. No need to train specialists from scratch.

Wanting to import trained teams sounds like a request to import some 5th columnist spies to monitor and sabotage...

Problems with mobilizing "wrong people".
https://t.me/rybar/39388

There's too much of that in the last days.  Other defense companies also report this:

_______


Colleagues, I want to ask you to publish a letter on what is happening in the microelectronic industry, and I hope the military enlistment offices and the Moscow Region will hear and take action:

“Dear representatives of the Defense Ministry, military registration and enlistment offices, military prosecutor's office.  In the microelectronics cluster in Zelenograd: Elins, Angstrem-T, Mikron and others, and in other cities, employees are being mobilized and the numbers are planned in the hundreds.  A number of key specialists have already been taken away.  I want to clarify what microelectronics is for our country.  Each specialist, up to his level, undergoes training for at least 10 years on very expensive installations that require the highest qualifications, with very specific knowledge.  Electronics is the foundation of any modern technology.  There is a shortage of specialists in the world now, they are being collected, they are fighting for them ... and we are giving them away under a bullet, a knife and an 82-mm mine.  This human capital is worth hundreds of millions and saves billions of lives, creating technological parity for those who are at the front from simple and mass professions, and somewhere an advantage on the battlefield.  Think about it, the cycle of restoring the previous production capacity is from 10 years, and taking into account the loss of training and personnel potential in such a quantity - at least 20 years.  You will simply bury the industry.  I don't know who made this decision and who issues summonses to people working at these enterprises.  But this is just sabotage or the worst stupidity with professional incompetence, when they cannot calculate the economy and the cost of human capital.

--
Sincerely, Kostromin Vasily Vladimirovich
General Director of the technology company FRAXIS LLC
Software products, IoT and instrumentation.

P.S. Seeing that structures for enlistment and mobilisation are same like in Serbia ( most likely inherited from Soviet Union), i can easily see why this would be happening. Only commander of the office is an officer and the rest are civilian bureaucrats. Of the worst kind i would add. These people are, very often bottom of the barrel when it comes to workforce, as they are working for very low pay. It is extremely important that this things get rectified as soon as possible and bureaucrats along with heads of enlistment offices punished. Guidelines for mobilisation were pretty clear and straightforward.

I would assume that, in ideal situation, they would just bring paperwork with the proof of employment or something like that. Military offices should have a list of companies and organizations from which people shouldn't be called up. If documentation checks up, just update database and problem is solved. That's in theory.
Mobilization guidelines are very clear.
Founder of Rybar channel is ex-officer of Russian army, captain or major. Rybar, probably, has some journalists, but also much more than that.
I don't think that these telegram channels should be taken lightly. They have massive number of followers (Podolyaka has over 2.5 millions, for example) and some get access very high up (Poddubnyi and Sladkov even met with Putin during SPIEF).