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Comment by keewee7 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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