Since Western countries imposed sanctions against Russia, Russia-based Baikal Electronics is looking to switch to RISC-V and may have turned to a certain China-based pure-play foundry for chip production.
An unnamed source told DIGITIMES Asia that Russian chipmaker Baikal Electronics may have turned to a China-based pure-play foundry to manufacture chips. As Baikal could not secure advanced chips and was blocked from accessing Arm technologies, the fabless semiconductor company is also eyeing the open-standard instruction set architecture RISC-V.
Baikai Electronics was founded in 2012 as a subsidiary of Russian supercomputing company T-Platform. However, as reported by Russian media CNews, a part of its ownership was transferred to Varton in 2020 after parent company T-Platform ran into a series of management issues.
Russia close to make it without TSMC
Back in 2015, the Russian fabless chipmaker introduced Baikal T-1 (officially known as BE-T1000), a 32-bit dual-core SoC based on the instruction set architecture MIPS. BE-T1000 targets various low-power application scenarios such as embedded, industrial, and communication, leveraging TSMC's 28nm process. The chipset also adopted High-Performance Flip-Chip Ball Grid Array (HFCBGA), a thermally enhanced version of the FCBGA advanced packaging technology. In 2019, the company unveiled BE-M1000, also known as Baikal-M, dedicated to PCs and multimedia applications. The chipset featured Arm Cortex-A57 cores, while its GPUs were based on Arm Mali-T628. Baikal-M leveraged TSMC's 16nm FinFET Compact (16FFC) platform while adopting Flip-Chip Land Grid Array (FCLGA) packaging technology. In 2021, Baikal-S (BE-S1000) was introduced for general-purpose servers, implementing Arm Cortex A75 cores and also featuring the TSMC 16FFCC platform and FCLGA technology.
As reported by Russian media Vedomosti on March 26, Baikal Electronics released 130,000 processors and outsourced the fabrication and packaging to Taiwan's TSMC. However, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, TSMC stopped supplying the Russian company, leading to 300,000 Baikal processors made by TSMC being unshipped in 2022. Baikal's original target was to bring annual shipment volume to 600,000 chips by 2025.
As a result, Vedomosti indicated that Baikal Electronics has been seeking to localize its chip packaging process in Russia. In fact, it has been cooperating with Kaliningrad-based CS Group since 2021 as a measure to tackle extended delivery times and rising prices amid the global chip shortage crisis. Now, Milandra and Mikron, both based in Zelenograd, Moscow, have also joined the effort. Previously, Milandr was only involved in the packaging of microcontrollers and peripheral chips, while GS Group's website claimed that its packaging capabilities include wire bonding, FCBGA, FCLGA, and even 2.5D integration. Nevertheless, Vedomosti cited sources revealing that more than half of the packaged chips were defective because of inadequate staff training and equipment configuration problems. Despite the challenges, a former senior TSMC official once observed that Russia had significant potential to polish up its domestic chip fabrication and packaging capabilities as its learning curve continued to improve amid trial and error.
Mikron, on the other hand, is a foundry that traces its history back to the 1960s, when the Soviet Union began its own efforts in semiconductor research and development. Though the company can handle the entire chip production chain from design, and fabrication to packaging, its most advanced process is 65nm, making it unsuitable for making Baikal's SoCs that require at least 28nm. Thus, a source familiar with the Russian government informed DIGITIMES Asia that Baikal may have turned to a foundry in China to produce its chips, without specifying which Chinese foundries and which Baikal products are involved. Back in 2022, Tom's Hardware already reported that Moscow was mulling Chinese foundries like SMIC and Hua Hong to make chips designed by Baikal and MCST, another Russian chipmaker working on relatively advanced designs.
Russia de-risks via RISC-V
Apart from Baikal-M, Baikal-S, and Baikal-T, the company is also planning Baikal-L, Baikal-M2, and Baikal-S2. However, it'd be impossible to rely on TSMC and domestic Russian foundries to produce them. The UK government sanction on Baikal also means that the Russian chipmaker will have to turn to alternative architectures to Arm.
A press release from RISC-V International in January 2022 showed that Baikal's parent company Varton Group acquired a stake in RISC-V developer CloudBEAR, and that Baikal is planning to use CloudBEAR's RISC-V IP cores in its projects for the development of Baikal-L and Baikal-S2 processors. Baikal-L is geared for laptops, while Baikal-S2 is for cloud servers. Milandr, one of Baikal's domestic packaging partners, already invested in CloudBEAR and started working with it over 5 years ago, including bringing CloudBEAR's RISC-V cores to mass production.
Furthermore, Russian news outlet CNews reported in July 2023 that Baikal is also working on a line of ASICs based on currently available architectures to target AI applications. In accordance, a new division was created within the company, and a key goal was to create a software ecosystem for the new processors. Whether or not it will use RISC-V remains to be seen.
