en.Wedoany.com Reported - The Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation (Minpromtorg RF) plans to allocate approximately 1.4 billion rubles for the development of domestically produced equipment for wet chemical processing of silicon wafers. This equipment is an automated production line primarily used for etching, cleaning, and drying silicon wafers with diameters of 100, 150, and 200 mm, aiming to replace similar products currently used by Russian enterprises from the United States and Japan.
A tender for the development of a prototype has been published on the government procurement portal. According to the tender conditions, the equipment must be capable of processing silicon wafers with a diameter of up to 200 mm, with a maximum batch size of 100 wafers. The equipment must be compatible with at least eight chemical reagents, including hydrofluoric acid, sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, ammonia water, and hydrogen peroxide. Different processes will use different chemical formulations, and the system must be able to automatically switch between incompatible substances without mixing them. Key components such as the rotor, chemical supply system, controller, and software must be of Russian origin, while imported components may only be used with the customer's consent.
The Ministry of Industry and Trade plans to complete the development work by November 2029. The contractor was determined on June 19, but its name is hidden in the government procurement system. The Ministry did not disclose the winner before signing the contract but confirmed that this direction will continue to be pursued within the framework of the electronic machinery manufacturing program. Experts explain that wet etching is a treatment process that uses chemical solutions to uniformly dissolve the surface layer of a material, used for removing thick layers, eliminating contaminants, and selectively removing materials without defects. In the early stages of mass production, wet etching is applied more frequently, while finer operations use plasma chemical etching. The latter uses ionized gas in a vacuum chamber to act on the material, enabling high-precision structure formation. Wet processes are cheaper and easier to organize for mass production.
The chemical processing stage determines the quality of future chips, so the equipment must perform etching, cleaning, and drying of silicon wafers under strictly controlled conditions. The stability of these processes determines the reliability of the entire process flow. Currently, there is no direct domestic substitute for such equipment in Russia. However, the country has certain capabilities in automation, chemically resistant materials, and industrial software. Experts speculate that this development may be undertaken by institutions under the "Element" group, including the Research Institute of Microelectronics (NIIME) and the Research Institute of Technology for Microelectronics (NIITM). According to expert assessments, the announced funding is sufficient to support experimental design work, but without significant surplus. Such projects require long-term debugging, testing, work in cleanroom environments, and multiple iterations; cooperation and access to technology and materials will be key factors.
In June 2026, the Ministry of Industry and Trade also issued tenders for other experimental design work in the microelectronics field, with total funding of 7.6 billion rubles. These funds are planned for the development of equipment and materials required for lithography, molecular beam epitaxy, ion implantation control, and scanning electron microscopy. According to data provided by Valery Pivenya, Director of the Department of Machine Tool Manufacturing and Heavy Industry at the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the industry's output has grown from 2.93 billion rubles in 2023 to 5.32 billion rubles in 2025, and it is expected that this indicator may further increase by nearly 5% in 2026, reaching 5.58 billion rubles.
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