263
Russia Says It's Assembled a Lithography Machine, Will Make 350nm Chips Soon
(www.extremetech.com)
this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
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I think that behind those "oh, it's 30 years old" people miss one thing:
350nm chips are perfectly alright for many things. Simple controllers, chips inside various appliances, even some of the simpler military tech can absolutely rely on those chips.
It is way more than nothing.
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.
Russia has a market full of consumer and professional-grade GPUs from Nvidia and AMD, as well as all other components, available at regular computer stores that never went anywhere. It's not cut out from technology for sure, not even close. On that front, it's literally less affected than even China.
But it now has more power to grow independent manufacturing of chips useful for many industries, that now have lower risks of supply chain interruption.
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industry refusing to port things off of old chips, but the point is that you can do a lot of useful stuff with horribly outdated fabs.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).
Hairpin and a hammer? HA! THEY were lucky! We had to do lithography with nothing but a water droplet and sunlight! And firmware was burned in as well.
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
With much worse ones*
Are they telling the truth though?
Remains to be seen. I can see that coming.
Plus I would guess that few country could also rebuild the whole manufacturing process in a few years?
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.
Probably 20 per slab, and an annual yield of about two slabs combined. Of course it will only run for a month before breaking down, due to some vital part going missing.