Angstrem Memory IC’s in the USSR | Hacker News Reader

Angstrem Memory IC’s in the USSR

cpushack.com

59 pointszdw10 comments

Chips from that era from the USSR were interesting in many aspects, one of them was the odd (compared to Western, that is) pitch of the pins. The spacing in the West was based on the imperial system, typically 2.54 mm or a fraction of that between the pins, whereas the USSR stuff could be either 2.54, 2.5 or 2mm pitch.

This made some repairs quite hard simply because the parts even though nominally compatible with each other would not fit the holes over anything more than an 8 pin dip.

https://twitter.com/mikelectricstuf/status/14761436063397068...

It's interesting to note that this company was seemingly able to closely follow the west tech progress in the 70's but since the fall of the USSR, when they should have had a easier time given they were no longer prevented to trade worldwide, they instead started lagging far behind and they were still stuck on an early 90s level process (at 250 nm) in 2018 according to Wikipedia.

It's one thing to build a few samples, it's another to mass produce with high yield. The GDR produced a 1 Mbit DRAM chip with great fanfare, but was never able to mass product it with commercially viable yield.

Even the great fanfare was completely overblown: This was old technology.

The GDR "megachip" was ordered by the central committee in 1986 and VEB Carl Zeiss delivered the prototype in late summer 1988. They were planning to put it into production at Kombinat Mikroelektronik Erfurt by 1990, but this never happened as the GDR ceased to exist.

For comparison: Toshiba had 1Mbit DRAM in production in 1984, by 1989 they were at 8 Mbit already.

I spent several years taking buses to my little town from the bus station in front of Angstrem building, which is a remarkably long parallelepiped (the picture shows maybe 1/10th of the building, it is least half a km long), with many friends of my family having worked there in the waning Soviet era days.

Angstrem and many other organizations in Zelenograd was a high-tech facility for the time and the place, and yet already far behind the western time. Zelenograd was designed as an answer to Silicon Valley and for a while it was. Obviously that all failed.

Are Russian CPUs such as Elbrus still fabbed in Russia?

They where using TSMC fabs, but obviously that's no longer the case.

Russia currently don't have fab that goes beyond 90nm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikron_Group). There where plans to go to 28nm in 2030, but without access to western technologi that's not happening. The latest Elbrus is 28nm, so my guess is that they aren't made at all right now.

Edit: The latest Elbrus chip that Russia can fab appears to be the Elbrus-2SМ, which is a 300MHz processor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus-2S%2B

No, Russia doesn't have factories this modern. Elbrus and Baikal (ARM) were made at TSMC.

Baikal is MIPS, I think, but yes also TSMC.

Apparently there are different models. Baikal-T1 is MIPS, -S and -M are ARM.

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baikal-M

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