Russia's primary chipmaker is struggling with a defect rate of about 50 percent
Sanctions have crippled Baikal's production and packaging capabilities
Why it matters: Global sanctions against Russian companies have worked in at least one respect: Baikal Electronics can no longer supply enough chips to meet the country's needs, and half of the chips it produces are defective. Russia is working to build up its domestic capabilities, but it is unclear whether it can catch up.
Baikal Electronics, one of Russia's major processor developers, has been struggling in the wake of sanctions imposed by the US and UK governments following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Until then, the company ordered the production of chips, including their packaging, from TSMC.
The Taiwan-based chipmaker promptly stopped shipping processors that year because of the sanctions. The sanctions also blocked the Russian company from licensing Arm technology. Baikal, which switched from the Baikal-T series MIPS instruction set architecture to Arm years ago, used the technology in its Baikal-M, -S, and -L series chips.
The supply restrictions forced the company to turn inward to produce packaged and tested silicon. Russian business news outlet Vedomosti recently revealed that about half of the processors packaged in Russia are defective. A source told the paper that the failures are due to equipment that is not configured correctly and not having enough properly trained technicians for the chip packaging.
Say what you will about Russia, but it had its fair share of amazing scientists.
I wonder if the next generation will rise from these restrictions or have they already been fed as fodder into the war machine?
The brain drain that happened because of this war will take Russia decades to reverse. All the smart scientists got out fast.
The problem is so many talented and gifted young men fled the country as the war began. The UK intelligence agency estimates 1.3 million, those were families that had someone talented enough to work abroad and or had enough money to start over somewhere else. Not to mention the meat grinder...
source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65790759
The UDSSR had a quite good educational system. Communist countries usually had the lowest illiteracy rates
Yeah and they learned that agriculture (like in mother nature) was ruled by politics. Soo good education.
They had a lot of people and made any scientist/engineer who was successful into a celebrity.