Rosatom and Orion JV

History

2024: Establishing a Company

On May 7, 2024, it became known that the state corporation Rosatom and the Orion structure, which is part of the Aquarius group, are forming a joint venture that will develop and produce domestic microcontrollers for encrypting data in computing. Initial investments in the project will exceed 100 million rubles.

The Kommersant newspaper reports that within the framework of the joint venture it is planned to create a research and development center in Ivanovo. The specialists will design microcontrollers for servers, storage systems and other equipment. The production of products will be organized at the Aquarius plant in Shui: the expected production volume is 10-100 thousand microcontrollers per year.

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Promobit director Maxim Koposov believes that Russian-designed microcontrollers will be in demand in devices for critical information infrastructure (CII). In this case, the need for their use can be fixed normatively, for example, at the level of GOSTs. Alexey Borodastov, head of the GS Group product promotion department, adds that domestic microcircuits for data encryption can be used in terminals for payment by bank card or phone.

According to sources of the Kommersant newspaper, former employees of Baikal Electronics, whom Aquarius hired in 2023, will develop microcontrollers. They specialized in the Arm architecture, which is expected to form the basis of new domestic products. However, experts say, the use of British Arm technologies poses risks when using chips in CII. In addition, the declared amount of investment may be insufficient.

A microcontroller is a microcircuit manufactured at a lithographic factory; for its production, Aquarius would have to master lithographic production in Shui, for which 100 million rubles is clearly not enough, "Koposov emphasizes.[1]

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