Sanctions have crippled Baikal’s production and packaging capabilities
Why it matters: Global sanctions against Russian companies have worked in at least one respect: Baikal Electronics can no longer supply enough chips to meet the country’s needs, and half of the chips it produces are defective. Russia is working to build up its domestic capabilities, but it is unclear whether it can catch up.
Baikal Electronics, one of Russia’s major processor developers, has been struggling in the wake of sanctions imposed by the US and UK governments following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Until then, the company ordered the production of chips, including their packaging, from TSMC.
The Taiwan-based chipmaker promptly stopped shipping processors that year because of the sanctions. The sanctions also blocked the Russian company from licensing Arm technology. Baikal, which switched from the Baikal-T series MIPS instruction set architecture to Arm years ago, used the technology in its Baikal-M, -S, and -L series chips.
The supply restrictions forced the company to turn inward to produce packaged and tested silicon. Russian business news outlet Vedomosti recently revealed that about half of the processors packaged in Russia are defective. A source told the paper that the failures are due to equipment that is not configured correctly and not having enough properly trained technicians for the chip packaging.
Good call out, I totally failed to recognize that any chip made on a TSMC process isn’t going to be made in Russia. I’m trying to figure out what domestic fabs exist in Russia; from what I can tell Baikal is fabless. I have found an article that states Russia is aiming for a 28nm domestic process by 2027, so I guess their best chips at this point are likely in the 40+nm range. I’m going to keep reading though because I’m definitely curious about this.
Edit: this article paints an even worse picture for them. One of their fabs, Angstrom, had to disclose in bankruptcy proceedings 6 years ago that they hadn’t developed a process better than 250nm dispite licensing Intel 90nm process tech back in 2012.
From what I can tell, Mikron has been able to get a domestic 90nm process and possibly a 65nm process going in their domestic fabs. Sounds like they’re 20 years behind, yikes
Do they need to license intel tech? Can’t they just steal it? I assume no one will enforce that.
Well that licensing deal was 12 years ago. Things were very different before Russia invaded Crimea. Even if they had the ability to design smaller process chips, the machines needed to manufacture those processes are highly advanced and not manufactured in Russia.
All this reminds me of when China was finally able to mass-produce roller-ball pen tips…in 2017! They had been importing them the whole time. In 2012, one of the CCP big wigs threw a fit that in-house roller-ball tips were shit, so the CCP ran R&D for five years to finally introduce it in 2017