Taiwan only supplies low-clocked chips to Russia and Belarus

The Taiwanese government has announced a list of restrictions on the export of chips to Russia and Belarus. Taiwanese manufacturers are no longer allowed to supply chips with a clock speed higher than 25MHz to the countries.

The list provided by the Taiwanese Ministry of Economy according to DigiTimes has drawn up, contains export restrictions for chips and for chips producing machines. For example, Taiwanese chip manufacturers are not allowed to export to Russia or Belarus microprocessors that offer computing power of 5 gigaflops or more and that have an arithmetic logic unit of 32bit or more. In comparison, a 2000 PlayStation 2 already offered floating point performance of 6.2Gflops†

Furthermore, chips may not have a higher clock speed than 25MHz. Also, according to the list, chips are not allowed to have more than a single data or instruction bus, or a serial port that directly connects externally to parallel microcircuits with a throughput of 2.5MB/s. Taiwan also prohibits the export of lithography machines for chip production to the countries, as well as, for example, electron microscopes to inspect semiconductors.

The Taiwanese government refers to category 3 to 9 of the Wassenaar Arrangement, which describes an export ban on technology that could also be used for military purposes. The export ban is a sanction against Russia and Belarus for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Belarus is on the list because it could help Russia import the chips, according to the Taiwanese ministry.