Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

by Chris Miller

The KGB thought its campaign of theft provided Soviet semiconductor producers with extraordinary secrets, but getting a copy of a new chip didn’t guarantee Soviet engineers could produce it. The KGB began stealing semiconductor manufacturing equipment, too. The CIA claimed that the USSR had acquired nearly every facet of the semiconductor manufacturing process, including nine hundred Western machines for preparing materials needed for semiconductor fabrication; eight hundred machines for lithography and etching; and three hundred machines each for doping, packaging, and testing chips. However, a factory needed a full suite of equipment, and when machines broke down, they needed spare parts. Sometimes spare parts for foreign machines could be produced in the USSR, but this introduced new inefficiencies and defects. The system of theft and replication never worked well enough to convince Soviet military leaders they had a steady supply of quality chips, so they minimized the use of electronics and computers in military systems.