With Russian military hardware quite literally raining down onto the ground in Ukraine, it’s little wonder that a sizeable part of PCBs and more from these end up being sold on EBay. This was thus where [msylvain] got a guidance board from a 300 mm Tornado-S 9M542 GLONASS-guided projectile from, for some exploration and reverse-engineering. The first interesting surprise was that the board was produced in February of 2023, with the Tornado-S system having begun production in 2016.
The 9M542 and similar rocket projectiles are designed to reach their designated area with as much precision as possible, which where the guidance system comes into play. Using both GLONASS and inertial navigation, the rocket’s stack of PCBs (pictured) are supposed to process the sensor information and direct the control system, which for the 9M542 consists out of four canards. The board that [msylvain] is looking at appears to be one of the primary PCBs, containing some DC-DC and logic components, as well as three beefy gate arrays (ULAs). While somewhat similar to FPGAs, these are far less configurable, which is why the logic ICs around it are needed to tie everything together. For this reason, gate array technology was phased out globally by the 1990s due to the competition of FPGAs, which makes this dual-sided PCB both very modern and instantly vintage.
This is where a distinct 1980s Soviet electronics vibe begins, as along the way of noting the function of each identified IC, it’s clear that these are produced by the same Soviet-era factories, just with date stamps ranging from 2018 to more recent and surface-mount DIP-sized packages rather than through-hole.
Be careful with those boards.
Or else the chinese will buy them, recycle the chips and sell them back to Russia.
@paulvdh said: “Or else the chinese will buy them, recycle the chips and sell them back to Russia.”
Actually the Chinese will clone the chips and sell the copies to Russia.
Is that a roach wire I see snaking by C28 in the lead image?
If so, then very revealing about the design budget and QA procedures.
There’s loads of them ! Somebody should report back to the QA at the factory and get those things fixed.
Wiremods on a rapid design update in times of war, who-ever heard of that?
Is Potato 🥔!
Not a surprise.
https://youtu.be/vDcIA_9oP-o
Unless we’re expecting tube driven weaponry, like in Fallout.
I expect more quantum or photon based chips combined with birds brains (or grown brains on chips) for decision making.
To be or not to be?
There’s a lot of these leaked bits of technology going around at the moment. Making military secrets public is an interesting tactic. For the general hacker community it provides the opportunity to see things we may never get our hands on. Sometimes there are some pretty ingenious solutions to problems you may not have even thought existed.
Makes you wonder if there are any Russian “hackaday” sites that feature the PCBs from stinger missiles and other such Western tech…
Not quite, but I did tear down part of a Stinger while i was in Kyiv, it was there and I figured why not, how often do I get to do that sorta thing?
Spent most of my time in russian and iraninan stuff though
I think there is a great opportunity here to set up a ‘GoFundMe’, or whatever, to tear down Ruskie unexploded ordnance. I’d defo chip in a tenner.
Not sure about Russian hackers but you can check out Le labo de Michel on youtube. He has a teardown of a Javelin guidance computer, along with a lot of other cool bits of military hardware.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11_5TB0-lNw
Now I want a borscht soup with baguette.
I’m a little surprised those boards are sold on eBay, I’d imagine Russia would try to buy them and refurbish them to put them in a new missile. I’d expect the Ukrainians to smash them to pieces, to prevent them being used in another missile that will be used against them.
Yeah it makes you think probably it’s an intentional leak, a red herring. On eBay? Hmm..
I suppose there will be a time when an SU-34 is captured intact in UKR and is then sold on eBay either as a whole or as parts so blokes around the world can make YT videos that says nothing about how it works nor how to counteract such death machines, only that it was roughtly built by some post-soviet facility – thanks, I did not imagine that. ;)
BTW the title is misleading : there is no reverse-engineering here, only the description of the pcb & ic’s. Just saying… ;)
What could be the reason of using two PCB boards jumpwired together?
If I’m looking at the photos of the original rockets correctly, they look like cluster munitions. Really nasty.
Love the Inspector Clouseau voice…