Delete comment from: Ken Shirriff's blog
Soviet components had several problems, mostly with chemical industry lacking behind technologically. Plastic used for packaging was degrading quickly, and tend to crack and loose integrity. Chemicals used in production was uneven in quality, even producing substrate was a problem due to mechanical imprecision. Resulting components and ICs that was produced was uneven in quality and parameter drift, and one used for military was carefully selected (usually manual labor).
In order to compensate for component quality sometimes schematics can be over-engineered, as it may seem.
As for wires used to connects boards instead of back-plane of some kind - this was a common practice for soviet rocket technology - when installed inside a missile, board is subjected to g-force beyond 10g, it bends and traces will come loose and snap. So wiring was used everywhere in soviet military "rocket" electronics, even for connection between individual components.
Jan 21, 2020, 3:18:57 AM