Two years have passed since U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration pushed through the CHIPS and Science Act, which allocated $52 billion in subsidies to encourage semiconductor manufacturers to build up their capacity within the United States.
Over this period, the U.S. also imposed broad restrictions on the export of chip-related technology to China. The goal of these measures was to achieve U.S. self-sufficiency in microchips and to impede China’s quest to achieve the same. Have they succeeded?
U.S. efforts to limit China’s access to chipmaking technologies focus largely on the most advanced integrated circuits, which account for over 80% of the global semiconductor market. There are three main types of ICs: logic chips (used for data processing in mobile phones and personal computers), DRAM (a type of random-access memory commonly used in PCs and servers) and NAND (flash memory).
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