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Jun 5Liked by Michael McFaul

I hope President Biden is listening to you.

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thanks

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And not just the consumer-available chips, it’s CNC machine tools worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each, put on rail cars from China to North Korea and on to Russia, that worry me.

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Michael:

I am not a great economist like your colleagues from KSE. Neither a political strategist like your partner in the commission Mr. Yermak. However, here is my view as a field practitioner in electronics:

Anybody on Planet Earth, including anybody in Russia, Iraq or North Korea can do the following:

1. Buy a $276 Xilinx ZYNQ UltraScale board from AliExpress https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806802370452.html

2. Download Xilinx design tools from https://www.xilinx.com/support/download/index.html/content/xilinx/en/downloadNav/vivado-design-tools/2024-1.html

together with Xilinx tutorials on how to do everything, including DSP.

3. Download ARM programming tools from https://developer.arm.com/downloads/-/arm-gnu-toolchain-downloads

4. Build a perfectly fine control system for a Shahed drone.

5. If the designer does not like ARM and wants to add his own CPU to an FPGA, he can download an open-source embedded RISC-V CPU core from Western Digital from https://github.com/chipsalliance/Cores-VeeR-EH1 and either manufacture a CPU on Zelenograd Mikron foundry or configure $97 Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA board with it https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806579402414.html

What are you going to do with it? Prevent those evil Russians from saving $276 bucks? Drive to San Jose headquarters of Xilinx or Western Digital? Fly to Cambridge and have lunch with the president of ARM? They don't have control over it either, short of destroying their all tool ecosystem. Sanction AliExpress? They are in China.

What to do? Hmm, maybe invite the Chinese president to Switzerland and discuss his plan seriously? I don't know, I don't have a degree in politics.

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The Chinese president was invited to Switzerland.

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Thanks for these details, Yuri.

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