Russia's New Chip Tech is Stuck in the Year 2000: Behold the 150nm Wonder

The Zelenograd Nanotechnology Center (ZNTC) has unveiled a new electron-beam lithography machine designed to print chips at a 150nm process node. This maskless lithography system works by firing a focused beam of electrons directly onto a silicon wafer, skipping the need for traditional photomasks entirely.

This method is inherently slow, making it useless for modern mass production of consumer electronics, but the team claims it is perfect for prototyping specialized chips. The project, titled Progress ELL 150, is currently moving two prototypes through a four-month testing gauntlet to verify if the beams can actually draw circuits with the desired precision.

Company head Anatoly Kovalev (male) noted that the machines are being shipped 2,000 kilometers away for these trials. This follows a previous attempt by the lab to release a 350nm lithographer, showing a clear, if leisurely, trajectory toward the 21st century.

Building a 150nm machine in 2026 is like announcing the invention of a really fancy floppy disk drive. It is a monumental effort to re-invent the wheel long after the car has already evolved into an autonomous vehicle, proving that sometimes, state-funded innovation is just a very expensive way to ignore the last two decades of global progress.