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.
That's a part of it. The other part is that Ukraine wants our out of date stuff. The artillery rounds that we produce for ourselves aren't the rounds we are sending to Ukraine. We haven't manufactured the older generation of rounds for decades, so we are having to ramp up production on products that we discontinued.This was supposed to be a reply to the comment below yours.
Nothing we are sending for artillery or rockets or missiles is discontinued. That’s all current military systems. The artillery sent to what our troops use. Not sure why you think we are sending obsolete equipment.
Because the news articles I've seen over the last two years indicate that we are giving them last generation equipment and ammo. They haven't gotten any of the new stuff, or at least it hasn't been reported on
155mm ammo is the same ammo we’ve been shooting since at least WW2. They are getting older weapons but they fire the same ammo.
No we are not giving them our most advanced ammo in large quantities because it’s expensive and we need it.
The M1 tanks they are being given are still better than anything Russia has. Same with the Bradleys.
Even our troops don’t have the all the latest and greatest.