Captured Russian Weapons Are Packed with U.S. Microchips | Hacker News Reader

Captured Russian Weapons Are Packed with U.S. Microchips

thedrive.com

15 pointskeewee78 comments

There is not really any Russian or Chinese alternatives to modern high-end FPGAs from Xilinx and Intel/Altera. These FPGAs are important in modern radar and electronic warfare systems.

However I expected the Russians to be designing and manufacturing their own 32-bit MCUs by now. Surprised that they're not doing that.

Kind of makes the open chip movement a little bit less glossy, thinking of there being really good work anyone can use. OpenFPGA, plenty of RISC-V cores... society wants to be able to advance, to improve, but when we start to see the price includes letting warmongers also support themselves...

That said, these people would probably figure out some kind of solution eventually. But damn this makes it easy.

In this case the insticators are the warmongers, in another the need for openhardware could be the defenders. Like privacy you can't be selective about who gets it.

The civil world, in general, tends to shield defenders. It's likely that a country being assaulted will have many people willing to help it with chis, if it comes to that.

Aggressors, condemned by the world, are the people who need to bootstrap their own capabilities, & will most strongly need & be able to leverage open hardware.

I don't like it but this is still my read here. And we still definitely definitely need to do openhardware. But these are new relevant factors.

They are not doing that, because they have big troubles to pull off semiconductor manufacturing

See Asianometry: Why Russia Can’t Replace TSMC - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_4R4X7AWtU

Not microchips, but that article has a picture of a helicopter with concentric, dual rotors. I can't get over how complicated the swash plates and other mechanisms are. The maintenance on those must be wild, both in time and material requirements.

For another interesting variation, check out the "eggbeater" rotors built by Kaman as well as a couple other companies.

What else would you expect when globalism is the preferred world economic setup?

What's the bet that Raytheon planes and missiles are full of Russian titanium?

History is full of instances where warring nations buy stuff from their enemies via middlemen.

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