TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Taiwan has imposed a ban on the sale of modern chips to Russia and Belarus in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

This week, Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) published a list of strategic high-tech goods that are barred from export to Russia and Belarus, reported DigiTimes. The ministry stated exports of these high-tech commodities are also banned from Belarus because it could help Russia bypass the sanctions.

Firms from these two countries are now banned from purchasing Taiwan-made microprocessors or microcircuits which have any of the following specifications: performance speeds of 5 gigaflops or above, clock frequency rates in excess of 25 MHz, an external interconnection with a data transfer rate of 2.5 MB/s or greater, more than 144 pins, or a basic propagation delay time of less than 0.4 nanoseconds.

These conditions essentially exclude Russia and Belarus from modern technology made in Taiwan. Tom's Hardware pointed out that when Sony's PlayStation 2 was released in 2000, its optimal performance was about 6.2 FP32 gigaflops, while the PlayStation 5, which was released 20 years later has 10.3 teraFlops.

In addition, Taiwan will no longer sell chip production equipment to these countries. This includes alignment and exposure equipment for wafer production, scanners, and scanning electron microscopes.