Biden dropped a real hammer on Chinese chipmaking. People are just walking out from fabs all around China and fabs are closing without services and support.

A one-year Temporary General License softens the blow for foreign companies but just delays the catastrophe for Chinese chip manufacturing. Besides removing US citizens, green card holders, and people living in the US from working or serving Chinese chipmakers, exports are restricted. Everything that includes the US made tools and software for design and manufacturing, and machinery is cut out.

Thresholds:

• Logic chips with non-planar transistor architectures (I.e., FinFET or GAAFET) of 16nm or 14nm, or below;

• DRAM memory chips of 18nm half-pitch or less;

• NAND flash memory chips with 128 layers or more.