Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs has announced a new list of technological items that are already banned from sale to Russia and its close ally Belarus.
According to Digitimes, the bans include almost any type of processor created in the last 30 years. This means that it will be increasingly difficult for Russia to obtain chips for its military operation, but in addition, even chips for ordinary items such as smartphones, consumer electronics and vehicles will be difficult to obtain.
According to Digitimes, the list of banned processors includes each model with the following features or characteristics:
- It has a performance of 5 GFLOPS or higher
- Operates at 25 MHz or higher
- Arithmetic logic unit of 32 bits or more
- It has an external connection speed of 2.5 MB / s or more
- There are more than 144 pins
- There is generally a delay time of gate propagation of less than 0.4 nanoseconds
What do these numbers mean?
Intel’s i386 processor had an operating frequency of 40MHz in the late 80’s. In terms of GFLOPs, the PlayStation 2, which debuted in 2000, is capable of 6.2 GFLOPs, running at around 300MHz.
In practice, Taiwan will not export even 40-year-old processors to Russia.
Russia has its own semiconductor industry, which is about 20 years behind. The Russian government has said it wants 28nm production to begin and operate by 2030. Due to the sanctions, all machines for the production of Russian chips must also be 100% Russian. This is where the biggest problem is. Meanwhile, today Taiwan produces chips in the 5nm and 3nm manufacturing process.
Even China, which is in a much better economic position than Russia, still lacks a competitive semiconductor industry, which means Russia is unlikely to have access to modern chips any time soon.
However, Russia is expected to find a way to supply chips through intermediaries.
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