Taiwan bans sales of CPUs over 25MHz to Russia

Until now, it was the Western countries that imposed economic sanctions on Russia and to some extent also against Belarus. In addition, there are many individual companies that have partially stopped trading with Russia on their own initiative.

enlightened this week Digitimes Asia who – which Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs posted existing On high-tech products, it is prohibited to export them from the country, to Russia and Belarus. This is not without significance, since many of the world’s largest chip manufacturers are Taiwanese.

It is still a bit unclear how much new it is, as the document has been discussed with the listing In a press release From the ministry already in April. However, it may have since been updated.

Everything from modern processors and microchips

Microprocessors and other semiconductor products are affected if they:

• It can deliver floating point performance of more than 5 gigaflops (5 billion floating-point operations per second) and has an Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) of 32 or more bits wide
• It has a clock speed of over 25MHz
• Has more than one instruction or data carrier
• It has a serial communication port that can connect a direct external connection between parallel microcircuits with a data rate of at least 2.5 megabytes per second.
• Has more than 144 pins
• It has a “core gate spread” delay of less than 0.4 ns.

In addition, the Taiwan authorities imposed a ban on the export of optical and X-ray equipment for the production of chips. also scanning electron microscopes Designed for automated inspection of patterns in semiconductor devices affected by blocking.

Russia’s war in Ukraine is not the only conflict that worries the authorities in Taiwan. Relations with China have deteriorated recently, and According to the record This worries authorities in both the US and the EU, not least because Taiwan is an important supplier of microchips.

70 percent

Last week, US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo tweeted that 70 percent of the microchips the United States buys come from Taiwan.

According to the record, this has led to new talks and initiatives between Taiwan and the United States and between Taiwan and the European Union. In any case, the initiative in which the United States participates includes cooperation on ways to counteract potential harm from trading partners that adopt non-market-based policies and practices that could harm the livelihoods of residents, as well as businesses and employees, in Taiwan and the United States.

The record thinks this is very reminiscent of a reference to China, which was said to have warned the United States even before the talks against any cooperation with Taiwan.