The war escalates and crosses borders beyond the military in an attempt to smother Russia economically, but also technologically with chips. The United States is warning generally and then specifically about what is to come and makes very clear what action it will take if countries like China support Vladimir Putin. Can Biden cut to the chase as he says with China?
That Russia wants to circumvent NATO restrictions by one means or another is something the United States is very clear about, which is why they are issuing a brief and concise statement which, oddly enough, has already slipped on a similar tone with Taiwan. the Commerce Department It has more power than we think and a clear example is what we will see next.
TSMC will comply with the restrictions, is SMIC able and willing to do so?
With the Taiwan issue now resolved, or at least in front of the public, it’s China’s turn, a second part of what we’re going through with Huawei and where it’s been clearly seen that whoever has the upper hand, this are the United States, although that does not prevent the oil from coming out of it sometimes.
Gina Raimondo, Commerce Secretary of the country of stars and stripes, warns very categorically:
Russia “will certainly woo other countries to end our sanctions and export controls. But if the United States finds out that a company like Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation in Shanghai is selling its chips to Russia, “wholesale we could close the minimum wage because we prevented them from using our equipment and software”
That said, which seems to be a threat in its own right, Raimondo softens what is written to reduce the previous tension:
“They have their own interest in not supplying these things to Russia. So they don’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts. It would be devastating to China’s ability to produce these chips. »
These statements don’t make much sense at first, mainly because if we are aware of SMIC’s capabilities, we’ll know that they don’t have peak nodes like TSMC does. So what is the secretary pointing to?
Russia needs chips with old and cheap lithographic processes
Russia’s weapons capability is based on proven chips, the main curiosity of which is that they are not the most advanced in the world in terms of performance. It is rather the opposite, they seek reliability and low cost because apart from certain types of missiles, most of their weapons and technologies are based on processors and chips 28nmprecisely those that TSMC and SMIC can manufacture at a lower cost, although they are currently the most demanded due to the crisis.
Can the United States close the minimum wage? Well for the most part yes, keep in mind that the scanners are from Europe, with ASML many licenses are from ARM and the rest from Intel or AMD, since the design itself RISC-V/MIPS from Loongson 5000 includes for example simulated x86.
Therefore, and knowing that we will never know the level of implementation of American technology and software by China, it is to be expected that the threat is real and that they have studied it well. We will have to see how the Asian giant reacts to this threat, because at the moment China is comfortable looking at the bulls from the side.
