Chip production: Russia builds its first own lithography systems

Russia has announced a success in the production of domestic chip manufacturing technology: The Zelenograd Nanotechnology Center (ZNTC, ЗНТЦ) has produced the first Russian lithography system together with Planar (ПЛАНАР). Planar has its headquarters in Belarus.

Until now, Russian chip manufacturers such as Angstrem have been dependent on foreign lithography systems. According to the Dutch media, they also imported obsolete ASML systems from China.

Decades of lagging behind

However, Russian production technology lags far behind the state of the art in Taiwan, the USA, China and other industrialized countries. According to the company, the ZNTC system can only expose relatively coarse structures of 350 nanometers on 200 mm silicon wafers. Those responsible remain silent on the details. There is only cryptic talk of a solid-state laser.

Western and Asian chip manufacturers produced 350 nm chips in the 1990s, Intel for example the Pentium P54CS and P55C and MIPS Technologies the VR4300i for the Nintendo 64 console.

The world's largest chip contract manufacturer TSMC is switching to 2 nm production technology with 300 mm wafers this year.

Interesting for the military

Russia is three decades behind. No competitive processors or other logic chips can be produced for desktop PCs, servers, notebooks or smartphones. The new production lines that have been announced are likely to be intended for microcontrollers and sensors. One conceivable customer: the military.

Russia produces some chips itself, for example for cruise missiles. However, even with its own lithography systems, Russia remains dependent on foreign manufacturers: In misfired cruise missiles, researchers found signal processors (DSPs) from Texas Instruments (TI) with 40 nm technology and finer, among others. Russian companies are said to be able to produce chips with 90 nm structures themselves.

The ZNTC aims to complete the development of its own lithography systems for 130 nm processes by the end of 2026. These would then presumably be ready for use in 2027 or 2028. 130 nm corresponds to a technology level from the early 2000s. Lobachevsky University in Nizhny Novgorod announced the development of lithography systems for 7 nm chips as early as 2022, but this already sounded implausible at the time. Compared to foreign manufacturers, research budgets in Russia are small.

(mma)