Russia Says It's Assembled a Lithography Machine, Will Make 350nm Chips Soon

.... And they're able to make chips good enough for their military.

Russia's military is in large parts only slightly refurbished soviet gear. For a T72 or even T90, a 90s era chip is still good enough.

Why do you think they dismantled all those washing machines? The microcontrollers in there aren't high tech at all.

I found the box art for Mushroom Plumber 64

Fun fact about tamigotchis, a couple years ago I was looking up if they still made them and I ran across something talking about the tech in modern versions and apparently the newest version of them at the time was running a variant of the MOS6502 microprocessor. This is the same microprocessor that Commodore used a variant of in the Commodore 64.

My Pentium II back in the day ran Diablo, StarCraft and AoE. So way more than a Tamagotchi. Glorious Mother Russia bringing back the good old days...

AKSHUALLY (not sticking up for Russia here), it's mostly dependent on how much energy they want to waste. They could make massive dies of whatever if they can power it. Probably with oil. It'll never be up to par with "modern" tech, but this is one of those things that seems to unlock a modern society.

If they can source materials, and improve on the process to be competitive, it's another dumb fucking race that humanity has to endure.

"Dash through the Gulag, collect potatoes, and save the Motherland in Mushroom Plumber 3D!"

In fairness, that was a pretty solid era. It wasn’t peak tech but I’d be ok going back.

It was probably a mistake for society to advance beyond the era when computers weren’t super portable and phones were just “smartish.” Like that BlackBerry era where you could communicate and get news if you needed it but it was enough of a hassle that you usually just waited until you were at home or the office to get caught up.

Sure but weren't they raiding washing machines to get chips for their tanks? This is a pretty big step to avoid embargos and pretty significant that they need to do it.

And all the Furbys their little hearts desire!

... And combat jet MC's or brains for missiles\simple suicide drones.

N64 is sufficiently good for a lot of things.

If this is real. Living in Russia I doubt that.

Love that the article header is a picture of a Pentium II. That's cold as ice 💀

Yeah. Foundries/manufacturing processes last decades. I feel like Reddit/Lemmy is very consumer electronics focused, so they think anything worse than TSMC's N3 process is literally unusable garbage (slight exaggeration but I'm sure you get my point)

Plus this isn't the most advanced process they can make. We know for a fact they at least have 90nm lithography machines, they just weren't made in-house like this one. And it's undeniable they're smuggling stuff in from other countries. Like do people really think Russia has no modern GPUs for things like simulations, crunching satellite images, etc? Pull the other one.

This, unfortunately, is certainly a big deal and will be very important to Russia. Hence why they sought to do it in the first place.

Are they a threat to countries like the US, UK, France, etc? Of course not. But Russia seemingly transitioning themselves to a war-based economy should be concerning for people regardless.

Yeah, those old fabs are still useful. Here's what Microchip Technology Inc runs:

https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/00004075.pdf

See page 6.Their fab in Lawrence, MA only goes down to 1000nm. Their other locations go down to 250 or 110nm. IIRC, some of that is the auto industry refusing to port things off of old chips, but the point is that you can do a lot of useful stuff with horribly outdated fabs.

Yep. Look at it this way, those $100,000+ machining centers that make nearly everything you use and own, are running on basically 486 chips. And they only transitioned from the 386's because the dies wore out and the chip manufacturers said they weren't going to remake them. It caused a noticeable amount of angst in manufacturing when the news got out.

Yeah, not to mention some low level engineers that built it only using a hairpin, a hammer, and a lithography machine ... (ofc joking, but I bet there are like five nerds that basically made it all happen).

That's like late 486 early pentium 1 era. You don't need a supercomputer for everything. The chip situation could be much shittier.

we landed on the moon with those

Plus I would guess that few country could also rebuild the whole manufacturing process in a few years?

Are they telling the truth though?

Ya but would you like a yield of 100 cpus per slab, or 5.000 ?

So it's a question of cost too I think, not an expert OFC.

So, it's obviously nothing like an across-the-board replacement, but you can make useful chips that aren't the latest and greatest.

If you want to do performance-competitive CPUs or competitive signal-processing for radars or whatever, then it won't work.

But let's say that you want to make a voltage-regulator chip (something that I know we have put on sanctions lists for Russia). Power supplies need those, so you're gonna pretty universally want them. That doesn't need to be particularly high resolution.

Think of all the problems that automakers had due to COVID-19 chip disruption. That was mostly over old, low resolution chips...but they had to have them to ship cars. The article specifically mentions auto manufacture.

Microcontrollers do a lot of work in consumer electronics. Probably have one in your microwave oven. Not very fancy, but it lets you plonk logic in in software.

Russia can probably smuggle in some chips. But that's expensive (because criminals are going to want a premium for their risk) and risky. Let's say that you're trying to buy sanctioned CPUs in Kazakhstan from sketchy parties.

Maybe one of those parties is a (comparatively) upstanding smuggler getting you the real thing and just charging you an arm and a leg.

Or maybe it's from some enterprising party selling counterfeits, because now the original manufacturer isn't gonna be working with you to verify that the stuff is authentic, and that knockoff doesn't have the same testing and has some problems.

Or maybe the person you've run into is with the CIA and intending to poison your sanction-busting smuggled supplies of chips with backdoored or sabotaged versions.

Russia will source what it has to from the black market, but the less stuff in their supply chain that comes from the black market, the better-off they are.

The design/manufacturing of a chip is separate from the lithography machine itself

This is the first lithography machine Russia has built. They’d be getting the 90nm ones probably from ASML

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://www.piped.video/watch?v=N_4R4X7AWtU

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Not that lithography.