25 MHz Chips Is All That Russia & Belarus Gets From Taiwan, New Restrictions Deny Any Chip Over 0.005 TFLOPs

Taiwan's semiconductor companies have restricted Russia and Belarus from any chips that have a rated frequency of over 25 MHz & a maximum performance of 5 GFLOPs.

During the start of the Ukrainian conflict with Russia, major tech companies associated with the United States banned their technology from being imported by Russia. These include giants like Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD. Taiwan, being one of the major semiconductor hubs that have a really good relationship with the US, also imposed a ban on tech products, including microprocessors, from exportation to Russia and Belarus.

Now details regarding the restrictions have been unearthed by DigiTimes and most of the said items fall under Category 3 to Category 9 of the Wassenaar Arrangement. This arrangement was formulated in 1996 by 42 participating states and imposes various sanctions on items that fall under the following conditions:

Chips with Performance speeds reach 5 gigaFlops or higher.

Have an arithmetic logic unit that has an access width of 32 bits or more.

Clock frequency rates exceed 25MHz.

More than one data or instruction bus or one serial communication port that provides direct external interconnection between parallel microcircuits at a transfer rate of 2.5MB/s.

ICs with more than 144 pins

Having a basic gate propagation delay time of less than 0.4 nanoseconds are also prohibited.

These restrictions on these chips mostly mean that it's back to the stone age for Russia and Belarus as far as tech is concerned. Most of the chips and ICs that run today's modern tech world are in the multi MHz & GHz frequency range. Plus, the 5 GFLOPs figure means that Russians won't even be able to get the hands-on a Sony PlayStation 2 which offers 6.2 GFLOPs.

Alignment and exposure equipment for wafer production using photo-optical or X-ray methods, such as lithography equipment which includes image projection and transfer, step-and-repeat operation (direct step on wafers) or step-and-scan operation (scanners) processing, as well as scanning electron microscopes designed for automatic inspection of patterns of semiconductor devices are under the ban as well.

via DigiTimes

Taiwan's semiconductor chips industry amounts to a big chunk of the country's imports, landing at 32% (based on export value from 2021). R

News Source: Tomshardware