Russia’s Mikron is earning a bit of cash on the side by selling picture-framed test wafers as souvenirs. There are 12 designs in the product gallery, all priced at 12,500 rubles (~$170), with various frame backgrounds and commemorative texts. Mikron says supplies of these exclusive silicon wafer artworks are limited.
Spotted by Dmitrii Kuznetsov @torgeek on X, some of these wafers will feature the AMUR MIK32 RISC-V chip, produced in Russia since 2022. The computer and data science enthusiast also notes that Mikron is busy “preparing to release a new RISC-V — MIK32-2.” (machine translation)
The souvenir product pages also reveal that the framed 200mm wafers may also come packing between 30 to 120,000 chips, depending on the product. For example, one of the wafer designs may be full of transport card chips as used by the Moscow Metro.
Buyers visiting the Mikorn souvenir shop pages will choose their framed wafer by selecting the frame color and/or theme. For example, there are products with simple black or white frames. But there are other designs with lace, paisley, or even an outer space theme. What kind of wafer you get with your choice of frame, appears to be pot luck.
We used machine translation on the new 2026 edition wafer souvenirs, to see what the information panel to the lower left of the frame said. The top row of the table reads: 2026 | Made in Russia | Techno exclusive | Russian chips | 200mm. Moving to the second row: Silicon wafer with integrated circuits | The satellite plate is used in the technological process for quality control at all stages of microcircuit production.
If you manage to buy one of these Russian semiconductor industry souvenirs, you will need a space on your wall for a 270 x 270 x 15mm (10.6 x 10.6 x 0.6-inches) frame, which weighs 365g (~13 ounces). I think they look smart, but it would be even better if you had a piece of tech that actually used one of the chips from the wafers for your wall presentation.
If you have followed the link to Mikron’s souvenir shop and had a browse around, like us, there are a few other interesting trinkets to see. A much cheaper souvenir flagged as ‘new’ is the small tube of air from the firm’s NWP clean room in Zelenograd, priced at around $2. Elsewhere there are gift shop trinkets of the style you might find anywhere, like dolls, mugs, magnets, and puzzles.
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