UK bans ARM from licensing technology and providing technical support to Russian chip company
The British government has announced that it will continue to impose sanctions on Russia. The new policy requires chip design company ARM to stop licensing technology to 63 Russian entities. Sanctions include Baikal Electronics and the Moscow SPARC Technology Center. The above-mentioned companies or institutions are the most important chip R&D companies in Russia.
However, the view of industry insiders is that the sanctions are more symbolic because Russia itself does not have the ability to manufacture chips, which are all OEMs abroad. At the same time, the chip technology of the above-mentioned companies or institutions is also far behind the industry standard. For example, the Moscow SPARC Technology Center is still developing 28nm chips.
Baikal Electronics was founded in 2015 and mainly uses MIPS and ARM technology to develop chips. The main process used is 28nm and 16nm products. For example, the main shipment of Baikal BE-M1000 is based on the 28nm process with a power consumption of 35W and uses an ARM Cortex A57 core with the main frequency of about 1.5GHz. Baikal BE-S1000 is based on a 16nm process with a power consumption of 120W and has 48 ARM cores with a main frequency of 2.0GHz. The above chips are all manufactured by TSMC.
The chips of the Moscow SPARC Technology Center are all based on 28nm, and the performance is worse than the current mainstream CPU in the industry. It is not meaningful to compare. The reason given by the British government is to prevent Russia from bypassing Western sanctions by licensing ARM technology to replace Intel, Nvidia, and AMD products.
Previously, TSMC and Samsung were the main foundries of these chip R&D companies in Russia, and it is impossible to continue the foundry now. Therefore, Russia has previously formulated plans to cultivate its own high-end chip talents, but its own research and development of lithography machines cannot save near fires in a short period of time.
