Mikron 1663RU1 – first Russian 90nm chip: weekend die-shot

They want to reduce dependency on the u.s. . So maybe for use in their embedded industrial stuff ,and as a first step before producing a microcontroller (which 90nm is perfectly fine for) ?

> The fact that it's in a (gigantic by current standards) ceramic QFP would also suggest an aerospace application.

(For anyone else like myself who didn't know what a QFP was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quad_Flat_Package )

Why does a ceramic QFP suggest an aerospace application?

That is right, this is definitely for military and aerospace markets (there is not much modern civilian microelectronics manufacturing in Russia), but there are no redundancy or error correction on this chip. It is made on bulk silicon ("civilian" technology, rad-hard chips used SOI/SOS wafers in the past), and there are no tricks implemented to make it radiation hardened (like 8T DICE SRAM cells, embedded ECC with scrubbing, anti-latchup wells, special transistor layout to reduce radiation-induced leakage... e.t.c). But even in non-hardened variant with some precautions it could be used on space applications outside radiation belts.

There may not be a major target market. SRAM is one of the easiest kinds of chips to make- very regular patterning, doesn't need an army of engineers to design... so it could be a launch vehicle whose primary goal is to flush out the design & manufacturing process, with other chips to follow.

The 6T cell is also a critical building block to many kinds of chips, and it in itself can be hard to get right, so nailing it down early in an easier chip is good.

Wouldn't the other two chips have the exact same backdoor and react in the same way to the same inputs?

They might be afraid of sanctions from other countries. Russia should be able to self-sustain at least to certain degree (military, providing basic services to citizens).

T.zssdt

> What is so special about this chip?

It's basically first real confirmation that 90nm can be produced in Russia. In past there was a lot of press and talk, but noone ever seen actual chips.

> So how does this compare to other high-end Intel chips out there where they are already are at even lower nm?

It compares poorly. There's nothing this chip can do that's special or more functional. It's just an SRAM, which is usually the first step in proving a process works and can produce something useful.

They'll probably eventually use this to implement some logic which means the chips would actually do computations instead of just storing data. For embedded applications, there's a decent amount you can do with a 90nm ASIC process, but there's only a few applications that would actually make it reasonable to pay the price to build a whole fab to make them.

The only thing that's special about this chip is that it's made in Russia, which means that if you're Russian, you can get a chip made in Russia. Which is something a military or government would care about, but few other people do.