Russian Geran-4 drone: three quarters of its electronics are US-made

More than three quarters of the electronic components in the onboard computer of Russia’s Geran-4 jet drone are made by American companies. That is the conclusion of a Ukrainian military engineer who goes by the call sign “Prop” and serves in the 1230th Engineering and Technical Regiment “Athena”. His analysis was retold by a Ukrainian military news portal.

“More than three quarters of the drone’s onboard computer consists of electronic components from American companies. The largest share comes from Texas Instruments and its subsidiary National Semiconductor,” the publication says. According to the portal, products from these two companies alone make up more than half of all components in the computer of the drone that crashed in the Poltava region in 2026.

What was found in the drone

After comparing the motherboard descriptions with lists of manufacturers, “Prop” identified 105 electronic components. At least 80 of them, or 76.19%, were made by American companies. The rest were supplied by Intersil (part of Japan’s Renesas Electronics), Germany’s Infineon Technologies, the Netherlands’ STMicroelectronics and Taiwan’s Richtek, which belongs to the semiconductor giant MediaTek. No Russian-made electronic components were found in the analysis.

According to the authors of the analysis, the foreign parts handle, for example, the processing of navigation data, engine control, power supply and the exchange of signals between circuit boards.

How many parts a production run needs

If the list of components is scaled to a production volume of 2,800 units a month, the monthly demand comes to 21,000 processors, 42,000 transceivers and 33,000 voltage regulators. Three thousand drone control units would require up to 183,000 components from Texas Instruments and National Semiconductor alone.

At that pace, Texas Instruments’ monthly revenue from components for flight controllers of this type alone could be around €1.4 million (CZK 34 million). However, as the portal stressed, this is a rough estimate based on distributors’ retail prices, and the actual prices and Russia’s final costs are unknown.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz