Soviet Beauties: Processors from behind the Iron Curtain

The Soviet Union’s electronic programs were mainly focused on copying and cloning Western devices.  Either by simple theft, or painstaking reverse engineering.  They made clones of devices such as the Intel 8080, and the AMD 2901 as well as simple TTL.  The Soviets also made many single and multi-chip versions of the venerable DEC PDP-11 computer system.  Many of these have no Western analogs, they were pure creations of the Soviet industry.

Soviet Kvantor 580VM80 - Intel 8080 - Milspec

While Western chips rapidly transitioned into mostly black plastic by the 1980s the Soviets did not.  The 8080 above was made in 1991 though looks like something from the 70’s. Black plastic is cheap, and easy to make, but it isn’t great looking. The Soviets on the other hand made some of the best looking (if not always functioning) processors of the time.

Soviet J-11 Missing the chips

Here is just the substrate (its a non finished example) of a Soviet clone of the DEC J-11 CPU. Not often do you see a brilliant blue processor.

Soviet Angstrem K1801VM1

This is a nice pink ceramic Soviet PDP-11 5MHz CPU. Again this was made in 1991.  Its a form of surface mount package that was used extensively for industrial and military designs.  Just as the PDP-11 was used by the American military throughout the 70’s and 80’s. the Soviets used it (and now Russians) in todays times.

Soviet era CPUs are very interesting to collect.  Each state run factory had their own logo which was typically (but not always) put on the chip. Many part numbers were made by more then one factory. Most chips have a western analog, but not all.  Soviet chips also were ever so slightly different sized then Western ones. The Soviets used a pin spacing of 2.5mm where as the West used 0.1″ (2.54″), rather noticeable on a 40 pin DIP. Reading/translating some of the Cyrillic  based characters can be a chore but really when you get to see things like this…

Electronika J-11 - Image courtesy of iguana_kiev

Can you really complain?