The Ministry of Industry and Trade has canceled a number of tenders for the creation of critically important equipment for Russian lithographers. They are necessary for the production of sovereign processors and modern microelectronics.
One of the first, the department canceled a tender for 1.6 billion rubles for the development of the production of single-crystal calcium fluoride ingots. The material is used in the optics of excimer lasers, which ensure the production of chips with standards of 90 nm and below. Its supplies to Russia are unavailable, and domestic analogues are significantly inferior to the level of Nikon, Corning and Hellma.
The tender for 400 million rubles for the creation of technology for producing terbium-scandium-lutetium-aluminum garnet single crystals suffered the same fate. This material is necessary for polarization optical isolators, which are used by the Research Institute "Polyus", "Avesta" and "VPG Laseruan".
A project worth 800 million rubles for the production of powders for tantalum capacitor anodes was also cut. Now Russian manufacturers are forced to use imported materials — there are no own analogues that meet the requirements.
Market participants called the lack of funding a likely reason. They suggested that the funds were sent to more priority projects.
Most likely, the cancellation is not related to the abandonment of the development of these critical technologies, but to a revision of the strategy for their implementation towards greater centralization, linking with other projects, or finding a more effective way. For example, acquiring ready-made technology abroad through third countries, creating a joint venture.
A month earlier, it became known that the experiment on assembling Baikal-M chips in the Kaliningrad region was stopped due to a shortage of components.
