The authorities want to limit the use of electronics on foreign chips

The authorities want to limit the use of electronics with chips developed on closed foreign architectures at critical information infrastructure facilities. However, they are also used by Russian design centers, including Elvis and Baikal Electronics. An alternative could be open architectures, primarily RISC-V. But switching to them will complicate working with foreign factories.

The government expects that Russian electronics developers will gradually abandon the use of “foreign, undiscovered architectures,” complex functional blocks (SF blocks, also known as IP blocks, ready-made blocks for designing microcircuits) “and other results of intellectual activity” in the development and operation of military electronics, as well as products used at critical information infrastructure facilities (CII, includes banks, fuel and energy complex, telecom, etc.). This is stated in the updated “Consolidated Strategy for the Development of the Manufacturing Industry of the Russian Federation until 2030 and for the period until 2035.”

The document was published on September 13 on the legal information portal; the 24th section is dedicated to the electronics industry. The Ministry of Industry and Trade explained to Kommersant that we are talking about microprocessor architectures, adding that they are now forming approaches to “the primary use of exclusively domestic trusted solutions in terms of radio-electronic products at significant CII facilities.”

Before the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, large Russian microelectronics developers, such as Baikal Electronics and NPC Elvis, designed processors licensed by the British ARM. This simplified development (along with the license, the company received a set of development tools, as well as a description of the kernels) and ensured compatibility with the software stack at foreign factories – primarily Taiwanese TSMC. But in 2022, Russian design centers lost the opportunity to enter into new licensing agreements with ARM.

The development of processors on open architectures (the most famous of them is RISC-V) is carried out, in particular, by Yadro (in 2019 the company bought the Syntacore design center), Baikal Electronics and Milandr (designs microcontrollers). The MCST design center stands apart – it creates “Elbrus” on its own VLIW architecture (see “Kommersant” dated October 1, 2021).

Discussions about whether it is worth supporting open architectures at the state level have been going on at least since the end of 2020, says a Kommersant source close to the government: “Meetings were held to discuss the sanctions risks of ARM processors, prospects for supporting RISC-V, niche purpose of MCST developments, the experience of various countries was also analyzed.” MCST, Baikal Electronics, Yadro and Milandra declined to comment.

Open architecture today is the only opportunity for Russia to maintain a high position in the development and production of electronics and microelectronics, believes the head of the RISC-V Alliance, Anna Serebryanikova: “We believe that a comprehensive program of state support for developers working with this architecture is needed. There are no measures now, but I think they will appear.”

Refusal to use proprietary (closed) architectures in the design of microelectronics can only be achieved if contract manufacturing at foreign factories is abandoned, Kommersant’s source in the semiconductor manufacturer emphasizes: “Their systems are designed in such a way that they are compatible only with a certain set of licensed IP blocks.” . The general director of the Basis consortium, Arseny Brykin, agrees with this: “If chips are designed not on a foreign proprietary architecture, their release abroad will be complicated.”

However, according to a Kommersant source in one of the large design centers, “the industry now has virtually no other choice but to switch to designing chips on RISC-V.” “If we briefly describe the only Russian chip that we should expect in the near future,” explains Kommersant’s interlocutor, “it will be a processor developed on RISC-V, produced and packaged at a factory in China. But it’s not a fact that this chip can be called Russian.”

Nikita Korolev