The rate of drone advancement in the Russia-Ukraine war in just the past three years has been indescribable. Drones have truly upended traditional military doctrines and created a new battlefield, arguably yet another step in the evolution of wars getting more terrifying. However, another similarly-staggering recent development has been the slow replacement of Western electronic parts with fully-Chinese domestic parts. In the beginning of the war, many joked that Russia was stealing washing machines for parts. While I’m not sure that can be verified, the majority of simpler Russian equipment indeed shared parts that can be commonly found in washing machines. As a random example, the MPXV4006 pressure sensor used for height in the Granat-4 drone is just a washing machine water level sensor. There’s an argument to be made that there’s nothing wrong with using such cheap, commercial components in military equipment, but I don’t agree. In general, the Russian army has had to smuggle in lots of Western miscellaneous commercial chips like that, particularly STM32 microcontrollers and GPS modules, and it’s been able to do that to a large extent because those parts are so multi-use. However, that brings its own enormous difficulties – those parts have no traceability, aren’t rated for any difficult conditions, don’t have very good performance, and smuggling makes availability very spotty. This is compounded by the Russian military industry’s overreliance on using lots of cheap microcontrollers of completely different types in parallel.
However, over the past few months, more and more Russian equipment has been appearing where STM32s have become GD32s, which is an almost drop-in Chinese replacement. For Russia, GD32s are very easily and widely available, while due to sanctions, STM32s are not. This isn’t a new development, and building antique STM32s (like the STM32/GD32F103) isn’t difficult anymore. However, particularly after 2019, the Chinese chip industry has come out with some insane new developments, with a focus for chips that are primarily used by the military and extremely-high-complexity commercial/industrial equipment (think 5G towers or satellites). In this article, I want to showcase three of these, all of which are from separate sectors, using the new Shahed/Geran-2 drone. (main sources: Foreign components in weapons; Foreign components in weapons)
Starting off with the BMTI BC7K410TBG900I FPGA, which is a direct clone of the AMD/Xilinx Kintex 7 XC7K410T. BMTI is a Chinese manufacturer that calls itself a “major R&D entity of military and space qualified microelectronic components”. Their product description absolutely does not pull any punches, with many compatible versions of extremely-high-end components listed for sale. Some people deride these as clones, but I don’t see the point of insulting these components – even cloning a Kintex 7 is a truly incredible accomplishment that basically no other country but the US can do. What’s even more staggering is how quickly they’ve been catching up – the official timeline (indicated in this presentation by the “official supplier in Russia of high-reliability Chinese electronic components”) shows that it took them only a couple of years to create a compatible Kintex 7 at a 28nm process node. Even more shockingly, they have 260 million gate FPGAs – the Kintex 7 is only 400 thousand. There’s a store on Alibaba selling these for ~4eur, which I seriously don’t believe that, since the original costs hundreds of times more. Still, given that you can find Russian forum posts discussing these as far back as 2023, it’s highly likely that they’re being sold and becoming mainstream. The presentation linked above, which is in Russian, also spends much time focusing on these FPGAs for military use. Everything from the humble Zynq to the AMD/Xilinx Virtex UltraScale (which, by the way, released in 2017 and is an order of magnitude more complicated than the Kintex 7) is for sale and has a Chinese version. They even fixed some bugs of the originals! A similar Alibaba seller has Chinese Zynqs listed for ~20 cents (really?).
I cannot comment on the quality of these, but Chinese people can. From reading many technical discussions in (translated) Chinese and some Russian ones, they say that despite the chips being technologically about on the same level as the Western ones, their documentation and toolchains still lag behind. This is one fact that has consistently been true for Chinese components, and (for example) Atmel and STMicroelectronics have solidly demonstrated that good toolchains can absolutely lead to market dominance. I also completely agree on this point, and it may be a minor reason why modern Russian military equipment development seems to be slightly slower than Ukrainian.
As a side note, I do find it funny how Russian businesses are so open about flaunting sanctions – this is from a forum about finding business partners, completely publicly accessible:
Anyways, the availability of these FPGAs would likely result in a short-term slight negative decrease in productivity and quality as the toolchains are changed (though I doubt my much), processes and datasheets get moved around, but in the medium-term, these are likely to be far better than the random 1990s FPGAs Russian equipment has been using everywhere. FPGAs are absolutely critical in modern military equipment, because military equipment is inherently specialized in ways that commercial equipment cannot afford to be. As a result, the flexibility of FPGAs in terms of processing power, reprogrammability, and the ability to just use a single model or model range for everything, is irreplaceable. It seems like Russia did indeed solve the issue of the West’s sanctions on FPGAs – by not learning their lesson and completely importing all of their equipment from China. Nevertheless, this is still a worrying development for anyone in the West, as China’s military technology parity combined with their vast numbers of engineers and capital is seriously impressive. China should never have been and should never be underestimated, as it is difficult for most people to grasp the scale and difficulty of this accomplishment and technological leap.
These developments are mirrored in two other essential areas – high-end RF transceivers and ADC/DACs. RF transceivers are what makes drones dangerous, and good RF transceivers can turn a drone into an unjammable cruise missile. Many Russian high-end drones use the Analog Devices AD936x series, particularly the AD9361. These chips are basically magic – they allow a microprocessor or FPGA to send any data on a huge range of frequencies at high accuracy. If one frequency is being jammed, you can switch to another, or use different modulation schemes, or do some other black magic – that’s the point of these. However, they’re also very expensive (in the hundreds per unit) and quite difficult to get under sanctions, because everyone knows what you can use these for. So, China has a cheaper chip that was built even before the war that can do the work of the AD9361 (however, only a receiver) at a narrower frequency range. The CA-RF1947X is another tremendously impressive feat of engineering that is only a small part of this Chinese company’s very impressive lineup of analog chips.
Finally, rounding out the lineup is the MXT2401 (also by BMT), which is a quad, 16-bit, 125 MSPS ADC based on the AD9653. As with the previous two, this is also a huge achievement and a demonstration of just how far the Chinese electronics industry has come. The combination of the three chips mentioned above, with sensors and supporting circuitry, is basically everything you need to build a world-class drone. The fact that China can mass-produce these and Russia can buy them is worrying. On the other hand, since they’re based on existing Western chips, they – by definition – haven’t exceeded the West’s level of development, being barely a couple of years behind.
In the end, all I hope for is a peaceful resolution to the Russia-Ukraine War where Ukraine gets back all of its stolen territory, dignity, and most importantly, humans.
