Sovereign chips: Russia in the global semiconductor battle
Technological revolution in a single country
Chips are everything. Under such a slogan one can start any meeting of industrial commissions in any country. The problem with components proved to be especially acute during the last pandemic. For individual industries, the difficulties have not exhausted themselves to date. Since the beginning of the pandemic, automakers have been trapped in their own greed. As soon as the prospect of reduced demand due to lockdowns and other restrictions loomed, the concerns reduced purchases of chips and edited contracts. At the same time, the townspeople who settled at home began to urgently buy electronic gadgets and other equipment. In Russia alone, in 2021, the demand for electronics increased by 70 percent compared to the previous year. As a result, chip manufacturers gave all the freed capacity for semiconductors for phones and laptops. And when automakers caught on, feeling the growth in demand, time was lost. In 2021, the production of cars only due to a lack of electronic components around the world fell by a quarter. The pandemic has been canceled, but the shortage of chips in the auto industry has not gone away. In parallel with this, modern vehicles are saturated with electronics to the limit, further aggravating the situation. The boom in electric vehicles also required a multiple increase in the number of electronic components.
The Russian industry felt all the delights of the shortage of chips especially sharply in 2022, when foreigners one after another refused to supply. Conveyors with "primordially Russian" cars stood idle for several months due to a lack of ABS control units and airbags. The situation improved somewhat with the launch of the production of domestic ABS in the Kaluga Research and Production Enterprise Itelma. Only there is a nuance - the products are entirely and completely assembled under a Chinese license. Moreover, the most difficult part of the product - the electronic brains of the control unit - come to the conveyor ready-made from China. There is nothing surprising in this - the creation of a "sovereign" ABS will require more than one year and more than one billion investments. Russia is now forced to pay such a price for decades of the collapse of its own engineering school. The automotive industry is just one example in an endless series of production chains in which we are forced to use imported chips and components.
To build your own microelectronic industry, you will have to make a technological revolution. The restrictions imposed on the import of semiconductor hi-tech are not exclusively Russian "bonus". The Americans, who control most of the world's chip makers, are similarly seeking to slow down China's growth. The Dutch company ASM Lithography, which produces the most advanced photolithographs in the world, was banned by the United States from selling products to China, not to mention Russia. You can only buy well used cars 10-15 years old. Since August last year, the United States has a law on chips, or Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors Act (Law to stimulate the development of semiconductor production). The main goal is to move part of the production of microchips to the United States. At the moment, 70-75 percent of semiconductors are made by Americans in Taiwan. Under the very side of China. The CHIPS Act is based on $52 billion for the development of its own production and more than $24 billion for related tax incentives. There is a ban on deliveries to Russia and China of advanced graphics processors from the American Nvidia used in the construction of supercomputers. As planned, this should slow down the development of artificial intelligence. In March 2023, the CHIPS Act was tightened against China. Among other things, a ban has been introduced on investments in the production of chips with a topology of less than 28 nanometers, located in China. Beijing tried to respond asymmetrically and imposed export controls on gallium and germanium, widely used in microelectronics. At a minimum, this will force the West to seriously invest in the extraction and processing of rare earth metals - at the moment, China monopolizes the market. The battle over semiconductors is only getting hotter.
Russia intends to get involved in a world war of chips. Albeit with a giant lag, but get involved. At the moment, the country can produce chips with a topology of at least 65 nm, while the Taiwanese TSMC has already mastered 5 nm. There is no strategic catastrophe here - chips for missiles and other military equipment can be built at 100-150 nm, but in other industries there is no way without modern semiconductors. We are talking about our own supercomputers, the further miniaturization of night vision devices and the boundless civilian sector. Russia, in the end, will have to raise the aircraft industry, and there is no way here without its own world-class semiconductors. An ambitious program for the development of unmanned vehicles will also not do without modern chips. The first steps have already been taken. A factory for 28-nanometer topology chips is being built in Zelenograd, and Mikron received a loan of 7 billion rubles to expand production. Also, the Zelenograd Nanotechnology Center is developing a tender for 5,7 billion for a 130-nanometer photolithograph. Nearly a billion rubles were allocated to the center for a machine with a topology of 350 nm. Technologies, of course, the day before yesterday, but they are completely domestic. Recall that Russia is capable of producing 65-nm chips exclusively on previously purchased imported equipment - used Nikon and ASM Lithography. The government also thought about personnel training - 5 billion rubles are allocated for the construction of a network of test sites for testing the production of developed chips. It is hoped that for each product, the term for entering the series will be reduced by a whole year. One of the test sites is expected on the basis of the Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology. The plans include sites in St. Petersburg and other cities of Russia.
A spoon of tar
The government's attention to the problem of domestic microelectronics certainly deserves respect. But there is no way around this without skepticism. First of all, it is necessary to answer the question - who else in the world managed to build a "sovereign chip" alone? China is closest to us. In 2015, the PRC announced the concept of "Made in China 2025", according to which by 2025 the country will cover more than 70 percent of its domestic semiconductor needs on its own. But in 2022, that figure was barely 16 percent. The project failed. At the same time, despite all the difficulties, China has always been in a much more privileged position than Russia. How far it will be possible to crank out an equally ambitious project in our country is an open question.
The risks to the sovereign microchip program are not limited to the unique complexity of the product being created. First of all, these are engineering personnel. It is possible to allocate hundreds of billions of rubles for priority programs, but not to find highly qualified specialists. Creating world-class semiconductors requires the work of hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers and scientists. And not from one institute or design bureau, but from a whole conglomerate. There are plenty of pitfalls. For example, the Russian Institute for the Physics of Microstructures of the Russian Academy of Sciences has long and quite successfully been working on EUV photolithographs. These are modern machines that work on X-rays and are capable of "baking" chips at a rate of ten or less nanometers. Chief Researcher of the Institute, Corresponding Member Nikolai Salashchenko said in one of his interviews:
“We are making a lithograph that will be ten times cheaper than the existing ones. We expect that the prototype may take five to six years. And it will be a very popular machine for creating trial chips, for small-scale production.”
Reassuring picture, isn't it? Only the scientist gave an interview back in 2019. Five years have not passed yet, but News there is still no information about the breakthrough technology of maskless photolithography. But even if scientists manage to create a domestic photolithograph, this will not bring the production of microchips much closer. The time will come for process engineers who, firstly, must organize the mass production of the most complex products, and secondly, build and run factories. It is possible to develop a perfectly working prototype photolithograph that will outperform any product from Nikon and ASM Lithography, but fail its production. Unfortunately, a large part of domestic developments from the Soviet period fell victim to a similar pattern.
It is important to remember about the general culture of production of such complex equipment as microchips. The Indian example is illustrative. It was decided to organize the production of microchips in the country - Taiwanese Foxconn was invited for this. At first, they set their sights on topological norms of 28 nm, later they gradually descended to 40 nm, and as a result, the Taiwanese friends left the project altogether. You can talk a lot about the reasons, but the main one is that in India they could not find highly qualified personnel for production. Comparing Russia and India is, of course, incorrect. But we have enough reasons for this. Now conventional production is suffocating from a lack of labor and brains. In July 2023, according to Kommersant, 42 percent of industrial enterprises experience a shortage of workers. This has not happened since 1996. The company "Kronstadt", a well-known manufacturer drones, cannot find employees in nine specialties at once, among which the key ones are a commissioning and testing engineer, a process engineer, an aircraft assembly fitter and an aircraft electrical equipment installer. The problem looks like it will only get worse. Hence the question - where to get workers for future factories for the production of microchips?
Half of the solution to a problem is acknowledging that the problem exists. In Russia, with awareness of the situation, everything seems to be in order. It remains the case for small things - to deal with the second half of the problem.
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