Russia sanctions: Now the country is also running out of chips

In the wake of the Ukraine war, Russia is facing more and more sanctions. Now Taiwan, which is home to TSMC, the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturing plant, is also being added to the list. And from now on, it will no longer supply chips with clock speeds of more than 25 MHz to Russia and Belarus.

Russia sanctions: Taiwan prevents export of fast processors

The government of Taiwan has published a list of high-tech products that will henceforth no longer be exported to Russia and Belarus, according to a report by DigiTimes. Belarus is on the list because the country could help Russia import relevant chips, according to Taiwan’s government.

Among the products affected by the sanctions are advanced chips and processors from categories 3 to 9 (which includes electronics, computers, telecommunications, sensors and more) of the Wassenaar Arrangement.

In it, 33 founding nations (now 42 member states) established “export controls on conventional weapons and dual-use goods and technologies” in Wassenaar, the Netherlands, in November 1996. Specifically, the agreement covers all processors with clock speeds greater than 25 MHz, data rates of 2.5 MB/s and computing power of 5 GFLOPS.

No chips for Russia

What sounded like absolute high-tech for those days are nowadays values that sound almost ridiculous in view of the current technology. And thus virtually make the export of all chips impossible for Russia and Belarus.

TSMC, based in Hsinchu, Taiwan, is considered the world’s largest contract manufacturer within the semiconductor industry and supplies companies such as AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, Broadcom and many more with chips.

As a result of the new sanctions, exports to Russia are no longer possible. Corresponding chips are also used in the war machinery, which should at least slow down Russia’s rearmament significantly.

However, the country is not completely alone. Russia can continue to order and import high-tech chips from SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation) in China and, with restrictions, also from Samsung in Korea. However, production at the Russian microprocessor company MCST (Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies) is likely to slow down, at least noticeably, in the long term.