[3] The plant was launched under the auspices of NIIME (Scientific and research institute of molecular electronics) in Zelenograd, in the outskirts of Moscow, in a Soviet attempt to keep up with the rapidly developing Western microelectronics.

[1][4][5] During 1980-ties with the rising domestic economic problems and US embargo on hi-tech exports, Soviet chip-making industry mostly reverse-engineered, adapted and reproduced successful foreign designs, e.g. Mikron and NIIME were awarded for the development of ES EVM computer system, based on IBM/360 series.

[13][14][15] In late 2014 it was announced that Mikron had started pilot production of a domestic microprocessor called Elbrus-2SM using a 90 nm process under the import substitution program in Russia.

[16][17] Domestic production of the Elbrus-2SM microprocessor was selected by the readers of the technical magazine CNews as the most significant event of 2014, while the creation of a national card payment system ranked at number 3 on the list.

[23][24] During 1990-ties the Cold War era COCOM embargo was eased and in 2000-ties Russian chip manufacturing plants cooperated with US companies such as AMD in effort to obtain decommissioned past generation equipment needed to shorten the technological gap.

With this microcontroller Mikron targets various market niches left behind by the withdrawing foreign suppliers, such as Smart Home and Internet of Things appliances.

According to Vedomosti, actual demand far exceeded the capabilities of packaging available at Mikron, so the manufacturer engaged Kaliningrad-based GS Group plant as subcontractor for that job.