Iranian attack drone found to contain parts from more than a dozen US companies

Re:Iranian attack drone found to contain parts from more tha... by stefan_ on Thursday January 05, 2023 @12:27PM (#34263271)

You might be surprised, from the pictures of the insides the Shahed drones have a software-defined radio (SDR) in them with a decently beefy FPGA and presumably some other similarly expensive chips on the analog side.

Certainly for the FPGA side you can make the case that these things are actually very, very rare in true consumer products (anything that sells in numbers they are the first thing to go off the BOM, at all costs). But they power an overwhelming number of military gadgets that don't have the unit numbers to be sensitive to their cost.

So yeah, today FPGA are an utter commodity item that are impossible to trace. But if you want sanctions like these to work, they probably shouldn't be.

The SDR for reference: https://i.imgur.com/oyexLez.jpg

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Re:Iranian attack drone found to contain parts from more tha... by m4rtink on Thursday January 05, 2023 @01:00PM (#34263778)

I guess its using an FPGA as a foreign foundry won't fab something a custom one-way UAV signal processing chip for a sanctioned country & they don't have the technology to fab it themselves ?

And a discrete component version might not be realistically doable or too heavy/expensive.

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