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Comment by mattgrice | Hacker News Reader

What is the target market for a Russian 90nm 16Mbit SRAM? The only customers I can think of would be Russian defense contractors where domestic sourcing might be required. The fact that it's in a (gigantic by current standards) ceramic QFP would also suggest an aerospace application.

edit: here is a part from TI that might be similar, that Mouser has listed for $6,075.49. It is export-restricted, radiation hardened, and has advanced error detection and correction.

http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Texas-Instruments/SMV512...

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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.

yeah, I know some of those words

> 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?

Ceramic (vs plastic) is better suited for extended-temperature environments, which often implies aerospace or military.

There is some controversy here. In Russia all domestic chips authorized to be used in military equipment must be packaged in ceramic case. But the reasons for this lost in time when plastic packages were not good enough. These days it seems it is just a waste of money. In reality plastic packages offer some benefits for military applications over ceramic ones (like better G-shock/vibration resistance).

Essentially any time you see ceramic packages they are either US or Russian military where cost is not a consideration. Aerospace is very similar in their requirements for ruggedness and performance over temperature swings, so often end up using the same packed chips as the military rather than consumer level ones. Lots of early medical electronics like pacemakers seem to use military spec packages as well, presumably just because they are in a space where you can't really dig them out easily and replace some faulty consumer grade 74 series logic.

I think I saw some of those when I was working with guys who designed oilfield tools. It was always a challenge to find stuff with a decent MTBF in the 150C+ oilwell environment. IIRC, there was no published info on it, so we bought a ton of different brands and models, tested them all in-house, and built tools with the ones that performed the best.

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.

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) ?

90nm is probably too good for microcontrollers :-) STMicroelecronics make most of (cheaper) microcontrollers on 180nm, AVR's are closer to 500nm... There are lots of Russian microcontrollers already available (based on Cortex-M3, M0, M4 cores), but at the moment they are manufactured overseas (X-Fab is favorite fab in Russia). Domestically-manufactured microcontrollers are much simpler (AVR or old PIC-level, there is even Russian AVR clone, which is not very widely used).

>> STMicroelecronics make most of (cheaper) microcontrollers on 180nm

How come ? i know they do some 90nm mcu's - why bother with 180nm ? is it just because of deprecation of fab equipment ?

It's a cheaper and more robust process that can use higher operating voltages.

Could be... but there are many non-US places to get 90nm chips made. This is 10 year old technology. The only explanation that makes sense to me is that they needed not just a non-US source but a domestic one. I can't think of any mainstream commercial use for a chip of this kind.

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