Soviet integrated circuit designation
Soviet integrated circuit designation is an industrial specification for encoding of names of integrated circuits manufactured in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Union countries. 25 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a number of manufacturers in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, and Uzbekistan still use this designation. The designation uses the Cyrillic alphabet which sometimes leads to confusion where a Cyrillic letter has the same appearance as a Latin letter but is romanized as a different letter. Furthermore, for some Cyrillic letters the Romanization is ambiguous. History. The nomenclature for integrated circuits has changed  somewhat over the years as new standards were published: Throughout this article the standards are referred to by the year they came into force. Before 1968 each manufacturer used its own integrated circuit designation. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the standards were not as strictly enforced, and a number of manufacturers introduced manufacturer-specific designations again. These were typically used in parallel with the standards. However, integrated circuits for military, aerospace, and nuclear applications in Russia still have to follow the standard designation. Underlining this, the 2010 standard is explicitly labelled a Russian military standard. Beside  Russia the 2010 standard is applied in Belarus as well. Companies in Ukraine mostly stayed with the 1980 standard and prefixed the designation with the letter "У" (U), e.g. "УМ5701ВЕ51". The 1980 standard was published in Ukraine as DSTU 3212—95 (). Bulgarian designations for bipolar integrated circuits, e.g. , look confusingly similar to the 1968 Soviet designations but the standards differ. The functional group is also indicated by two letters in the Cyrillic alphabet and many groups were obviously copied from the Soviet standard ("АГ", "ИД", "ИЕ", "ЛБ", "ЛН", "ЛП", "МП", "ПК", "СА", "УС"). Some subgroups differ ("ТД", "УМ", "УО") and some  groups are completely different ("НС", "ОИ", "РН"). For the number after the functional group there is no concept of a series. Instead, that number usually matches the Western counterpart (e.g. the "1УО709С" is equivalent to a μA709). Also as a consequence of dissolution of the Soviet Union, COCOM restrictions were lifted and Russian integrated circuit design firms gained access to foundries abroad. In that sense it could be argued that the importance of the Soviet designation has spread across the globe. When foundries are not able to label the circuit in the Cyrillic alphabet then the Latin alphabet is used  (e.g. KF1174PP1). In general, devices already in production when a new standard came out kept their old designation. However, in some case devices were renamed: Structure of the designation. Structure (2010). Elements: Packages. Package designation (1973). The package of an integrated circuit was generally not indicated in the 1973 designation, except: Bare chips. For bare chips without a package an additional digit indicates the constructive variant. For the 1973 and 1980 standards the variant digit is appended with a dash after the designation (e.g. "К712РВ2-1" and , respectively). For the 2000 and 2010 standards the variant digit follows immediately after  the package designation N (e.g. "5862ПФ1Н4" and "1374МХ01Н1", respectively). Manufacturer designation. A manufacturer designation was introduced only with the 2000 standard. The table below is incomplete, many manufacturers still do not use their assigned designation. Manufacturer logos Other manufacturers which as of 2016 used a version of the Soviet integrated circuit designation include NTC Module, MCST, ELVEES Multicore, Fizika, Optron, Sapfir, NPK TTs, and Progress, all of them in Moscow, as well as PKK Milandr, Soyuz, and NIITAP in Zelenograd, NIIET Voronezh, SKTB ES Voronezh, Proton and Proton-Impuls Oryol, Vostok Novosibirsk, NZPP-KBR Nalchik, Planeta Novgorod, Iskra Ulyanovsk, NIIEMP  Penza, Almaz Kotovsk, Eltom Tomilino, Krip Tekhno Alexandrov, DELS Minsk, Kvazar Kiev, Kristall Kiev, Elektronni Komponenti Ivano-Frankivsk, Dnepr Kherson, and Foton Tashkent. Other markings. Although not strictly part of the designation, a number of markings are often found on integrated circuit packages: Military acceptance here means that the integrated circuit can be used in applications where its failure would be catastrophic and where repair or exchange is difficult or impossible (e.g. aerospace applications). For mask-programmed devices (e.g. gate arrays, mask-programmed single-chip microcontrollers, mask ROMs) a three- or four-digit mask number follows the type designation (e.g.  К1801ВП1-014). For bare chips a one-digit constructive variant identifier follows the type designation. A date code is usually printed on the package. In the early 1970s the date code consisted of a Roman numeral for the month and a two-digit year (e.g. IX 72). Later the month was given as one or two digits (e.g. 5-73 or 0386). In the late 1980s most plants switched to a 4-digit code with a 2-digit year followed by a 2-digit month (e.g. 8909) or a 2-digit week (e.g. 9051). Overall, the date code format was  not strictly enforced. Several series of integrated circuits (e.g. , ) bore an IEC 60062 letter and digit code (e.g. A1 for January 1990). Romanization. The Romanization of Russian is standardized, but there are at least 12 standards to choose from. Fortunately, the Soviet integrated circuit designation uses a subset of the Cyrillic alphabet where only a few letters are ambiguous: The more-common romanizations in bold are given as alternatives in the above tables. "Е" and "Э" are both romanized as E. The and the differ in some letters from the one used in English. For instance, the Russian "КР580ВМ80A" becomes  KR580VM80A in English and French but KR580WM80A in German literature.