Chipmakers' lack of ability to track the flow of many of their low-end products could hamper new U.S. sanctions aimed at blocking U.S. technology exports to Russia, industry executives and experts said.

According to a Reuters report on the 1st, late last year, the US Conflict Armed Research Center released a report saying that the chips on Russian drones came from Intel, NXP, Analog Devices, Samsung Electronics, Texas Instruments and STMicroelectronics.

Neither Texas Instruments nor STMicroelectronics responded to Reuters for comment. NXP and ADI said they complied with sanctions; Intel said it opposed its products being used to violate human rights; and Samsung said it did not make chips for military purposes.

Military weapons such as drones, missiles, helicopters, fighter jets, vehicles and electronic warfare equipment all require chips, which experts say often use older, well-tested chips. Now, under new U.S. sanctions, even some of the most basic chips cannot be shipped to Russia.

However, unlike the high-end precision chips that make supercomputers, which are sold directly to companies, low-cost commodity chips that may only be used to control power often go through several distributors before they end up in electronics, making it difficult to track chips. final flow.

"It's like a drug deal," said James Lewis, director of the Technology Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "There's patterning, there's middlemen, there's money laundering ... and there's a black market distribution network. "

He further stated that the purpose of sanctions against Russia is not to trace every chip, but to disrupt their supply chain, which the U.S. intelligence community has been working on. To this end, creative technical approaches can be taken.

Eric Schmidt, former chairman of Google, said in a recent interview about high-end processors, "For example, you can put a public-private key pair on each chip to authenticate it." Meiman Electronics said, Products that support fingerprinting and tracking are growing and are working with industry partners and customers to advance this space.

Tom Katsioulas, technology director at the Global Semiconductor Alliance, said the alliance has advised its members to build "trusted IoT ecosystem security" to tag and track chips.

However, it's probably a lot harder to do with a chip that sells for as little as $2 without making it prohibitively expensive because of it. The answer could be the manufacturing process, regulation, and perhaps the future. And sanctions against Russia will be the catalyst.