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.