Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) has announced a list of strategic high-tech commodities that are banned from exportation to Russia and Belarus.

Belarus is on the list as it may help Russia import such goods, MOEA said, adding the list is pursuant to Category 3 to Category 9 of Wassenaar Arrangement.

Microprocessors or microcircuits with any of the following conditions are under the ban: (1) Performance speeds reach 5 gigaFlops or higher and an arithmetic logic unit has access width of 32 bits or more; (2) clock frequency rates exceed 25MHz; (3) more than one data or instruction bus or one serial communication port that provide direct external interconnection between parallel microcircuits at a transfer rate of 2.5MB/s.

ICs with more than 144 pins or basic gate propagation delay time of less than 0.4 nanosecond are also prohibited.

Alignment and exposure equipment for wafer production using photo-optical or X-ray methods, such as lithography equipment which includes image projection and transfer, step-and-repeat operation (direct step on wafers) or step-and-scan operation (scanners) processing, as well as scanning electron microscopes designed for automatic inspection of patterns of semiconductor devices are under the ban as well.

Semiconductor equipment has become a main category of Taiwan’s machinery exports in terms of export value, accounting for 32.0% of total export value in 2021, with China, Hong Kong, Singapore and the US being major markets.