Soviet integrated circuit designation is an industrial specification for encoding of names of integrated circuits manufactured in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Union countries. 25 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a number of manufacturers in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, and Uzbekistan still use this designation. The designation uses the Cyrillic alphabet which sometimes leads to confusion where a Cyrillic letter has the same appearance as a Latin letter but is romanized as a different letter. Furthermore, for some Cyrillic letters the Romanization is ambiguous. History The nomenclature for integrated circuits has changed somewhat over the years as new standards were published: 1968 – NP0.034.000 (Russian: НП0.034.000) 1973 – GOST 18682—73 (Russian: ГОСТ 18682—73) 1980 – OST 11.073.915—80 (Russian: ОСТ 11.073.915—80) 2000 – OST 11.073.915—2000 (Russian: ОСТ 11.073.915—2000) 2010 – GOST RV 5901-005—2010 (Russian: ГОСТ РВ 5901-005—2010) Throughout this article the standards are referred to by the year they came into force. Before 1968 each manufacturer used its own integrated circuit designation. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the standards were not as strictly enforced, and a number of manufacturers introduced manufacturer-specific designations again. These were typically used in parallel with the standards. However, integrated circuits for military, aerospace, and nuclear applications in Russia still have to follow the standard designation. Underlining this, the 2010 standard is explicitly labelled a Russian military standard. Beside Russia the 2010 standard is applied in Belarus as well. Companies in Ukraine mostly stayed with the 1980 standard and prefixed the designation with the letter У (U), e.g. УМ5701ВЕ51. The 1980 standard was published in Ukraine as DSTU 3212—95 (). Bulgarian designations for bipolar integrated circuits, e.g. 1УО709С, look confusingly similar to the 1968 Soviet designations but the standards differ. The functional group is also indicated by two letters in the Cyrillic alphabet and many groups were obviously copied from the Soviet standard (АГ, ИД, ИЕ, ЛБ, ЛН, ЛП, МП, ПК, СА, УС). Some subgroups differ (ТД, УМ, УО) and some groups are completely different (НС, ОИ, РН). For the number after the functional group there is no concept of a series. Instead, that number usually matches the Western counterpart (e.g. the 1УО709С is equivalent to a μA709). Also as a consequence of dissolution of the Soviet Union, COCOM restrictions were lifted and Russian integrated circuit design firms gained access to foundries abroad. In that sense it could be argued