Having been completely shut out of Western technology and products, Russia is a tech-savvy player despite lagging far behind its main rivals and surprisingly it looks like it will not turn to China for the assault on cutting-edge chip technology. And it is that the Kremlin has given the green light to a new project where it is intended to create chips through x-ray lithographyAt what nanometer scale will Russia be able to manufacture processors?
The government of Vladimir Putin has launched an ambitious project with minimal funds that curiously has a fairly ambitious objective and logically the contract was won by the Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology, also known as MIET. With a grant of only 670 million rubles ($8.5 million to change) Putin intends to put on track and resume the manufacture of chips in his territory, but is this possible?
Russia joins ASML blacklist
It is true that the most advanced chips in the world are created by three countries outside the EU, such as USA, Taiwan and South Korea, but all are subject to the scanners of the European ASML. As we saw months ago, the company does not have permission to sell these scanners to China, and now it does not have permission to sell them to Russia due to the war in Ukraine, which, together with the decisions made by the NATO bloc in the economic and technological they completely isolate Putin and Russia to live with technology from 30 years ago.
The funny thing about all this is that the current state of the art wafer etching technology, EUV, was partly made possible by Russian know-how that was later used in ASML and that you won’t be able to enjoy now. Therefore, the goal of MIET is nothing more than to create a lithographic machine, a scanner that must not have masks based on an X-ray synchrotron, and if possible with a plasma source.
The goal: 28nm, 16nm and below chips… No date
Not depend on the West, be technologically independent and compete in the future with the big global companies and foundries. Almost nothing in the middle of 2022 and with no technical resources, but this is the Russian objective that will try to manufacture chips at 28 nm at first and then make the leap to 16nm and later processors could be seen at 10nm and below.
The problem is the time. China is working on lowering the 28nm which is equal to a delay of more than 10 years, Russia starts from approximately a delay of 15 years, but hopes to be even ahead in a short time thanks to the fact that X-rays have a shorter wavelength than EUV allows, at least theoretically.
The project will be launched From November of this year with the aim of having on the table and by that time a series of proposals and technical specifications of what the new Russian machine could achieve within the specified lithographs and logically based on X-rays. Of course, this project is important part of the Russian commitment to its army, which will benefit from the chips that are created in the years to come. Will Russia finally be able to create chips using X-rays?
