The End of Russia's Dream of Its Own Chips: Project Baikal Failed
According to Sergey Plastinin, CEO of Nanotech, after completing the Baikal M processor package experiment, the company achieved 74-85 percent of its value production. "Considering the complexity of the product, this is a very remarkable result," he noted, adding that achieving 98 percent defect-free chips requires a significantly larger number of crystals. To streamline the mass production process, it is necessary to assemble at least 1,000 microprocessors per month. "In our case, we were only talking about dozens of pieces," he explained.
"The Russian market for microcircuit encapsulation services has great potential. To unlock it, we must first return to implementing Russian microcircuits in civilian equipment," says Ivan Pokrovsky, head of ARPE. He notes that such plans existed until 2022 (before Putin invaded Ukraine – ed.), but were interrupted by sanctions.
What he doesn't explain is that over 80 percent of the chips Russia needed for both civilian and military needs were imported before the war. Sanctions halted these imports. And Russia has a single plant that produces chips.
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\n Theme of the issue: Cosmic apocalypse\n <\>\n <\>\n \n
The result was that, for example, Russia's largest bank, Sberbank, admitted in July 2022 that it was transferring chips from unused cards to new ones. Olga Maklashina, Sberbank's executive director, explains: "Chips have become rare (in Russia – ed.), they cost a lot. And our colleagues at the issuing center came up with a brilliant solution to the problem – reimplanting microchips in bank cards. We started removing chips from inactive cards and inserting them into new ones. We use cards that were issued after the old ones expired, but no one collected them," the manager assured.
The entire process is divided into three stages. The first involves collecting cards at bank branches, packaging them in secure packages, and transporting them to issuing centers. There, employees remove data from the cards and deliver it to the manufacturer. At the factory, they extract chips from old cards and insert them into new ones. However, this recycling process led to numerous rejections of such cards in Russia and abroad.
