Taiwan export ban prohibits Russia or Belarus from buying chips with frequencies lower than 25 MHz

This list is in compliance with the Wassenaar arrangement, from Category 3 to 9. It includes modern chips as well as technology that could reverse engineer them.

There are restrictions on the chips Russia and Belarus can purchase from Taiwan.

They must have a performance of at least 5 GFLOPS. For comparison, the peak performance of the Nintendo 3DS is 4.8 FP32 GFLOPS.

Export chips must not have ALUs greater than 32 bits, more pins than 144, a basic gate propagation delay of fewer than 0.04 nanoseconds, or an external interconnection that has a data transfer speed of 2.5 MB/s. Their operating frequency cannot exceed 25 MHz.

Russia’s sanctions on Russia for its war with Ukraine have had a severe impact on its chip supply. Intel, AMD and IBM stopped sales shortly after the invasion. Russia allowed bootleg chips imports, and even repurposing household items.

In Russia, the government has invested $38.3 million in microelectronics in order to increase the production of its 90nm node. It also hopes to manufacture a 28nm chip by 2030. However, Taiwan’s new restrictions could impact these plans. Russia may use the Zhaoxin chips from China, but this is unlikely given current sanctions.