[dragontamer]

USA's TI and GloFo and Micron/Crucial are all making our own chips.

I'm not talking 3nm top-of-the-line stuff (though Intel / Arizona is close to that). I'm talking about our 50-cent voltage regulator chips that's seemingly outside the ability for Russia to make (As Russia is clearly taking Ti chips from us somehow).

It's hilariously sad to see them struggle with sourcing such low levels of technology. This is decades old 180nm or older chips here.

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China is far far ahead, at least at EUV, likely under 10nm these days.

[sudosysgen]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikron_Group

This is incorrect - Russia does have domestic 180mm, 90nm, and 65nm fabs. You can even buy chips made at those fabs.

Ultimately it's cheaper to import a 50cent TI DAC (or a clone from China) than go through the entire design pipeline for your own. The rational choice is to import commodity grade chips (which can't be sanctioned anyways) and leave the domestic fabs to more sensitive things like radars, EW systems, etc... That require custom silicon.

[dragontamer]

Well sure. But if Russia has initiated effectively a war against an allied nation, and we see the missiles Russia shoot into Ukraine contains these commodity chips... we need to have a discussion with customs.

We can see that Russia prefers to import these $1 or cheaper chips, rather than build their own.

[sudosysgen]

It's not possible to stop them. These chips are literally commodities - some of them are actually technically counterfeit and you might never notice. The Russians will buy them from second hand markets, just like everyone else. They're just too cheap and too common for sanctions to be enforceable.

[dragontamer]

The point isn't to make things perfectly tight. Its to make Russia work harder to penetrate our defenses and increase the costs for them.

Every black market trick they do to penetrate customs to get these chips is another trick we can track and close down. Its ongoing work, but likely important for other wars that have yet to come (see China, who might pull the same crap if they start anything with Taiwan).

[sudosysgen]

It's not a question of customs. These chips are commodities and they can be bought by the thousands from, say, China - they aren't generally made or finished in the US either. US customs don't have a say in this.