Why Russia Can’t Replace TSMC
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it in threads about sanctions and Russian military electronics, as an explanation of Russia's semiconductor limits.
What it is
Asianometry explains why Russia cannot replace TSMC after sanctions halted chip shipments. It looks at Russian chip designers such as Baikal, MCST and Yadro, and at Russia's lagging domestic manufacturing capacity.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2022 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends breadloaf · 2022-05 · on “Captured Russian Weapons Are Packed with U.S. Microchips”
They are not doing that, because they have big troubles to pull off semiconductor manufacturing See Asianometry: Why Russia Can’t Replace TSMC - [this video]
Recommends mempko · 2024-01 · on “Most of Russia's War Chips Are Made by US and EU Companies (Intel, AMD, STM)”
Russia does build it's own chips but their fab tech is about 15 years behind the state of the art. The Asianometry YouTube channel has some details on Russia's own chips. [this video] While they build their own chips, the video looks at why Russia can't replace TSMC for all of domestic use. But I suspect the whole local industry is oriented towards the war machine. I doubt you need 3nm chips for missiles.
Cites freemint · 2022-03 · on “It happened to me: I accidentally attended a crypto bro dinner”
65nm is not plenty fast. Since Russia's 65nm capabilities are disputed [1] to be viable for mass production. That only leaves them with reliable 90nm fabs. This is 4GHz Pentium 4 at best. I have not seen any indication of video acceleration, so if a western CPU breaks and is replaced by a Russia made one it might no longer be able to play 4k video fluently. All the fabless semi conductor companies (Baikal, Elberus) only have recent designs for foreign nodes. Are you aware of any MCST chip that shipped in larger number on 65nm produced in Russia if this node is supposedly available since the early 2010s in Russia? I am asking like that because all Elberus chips smaller than 90nm seem to be fa