The Biden administration is expected to play the regulatory card against China regarding next-generation transistors Gate All Around (GAA) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM). This move comes with the various export control measures to prevent China from accessing cutting-edge semiconductor technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductors.
On June 11 (local time), media outlets uniformly reported that the U.S. government is considering additional regulations to block China’s access to the semiconductor technology used in AI.
The U.S. government’s export restrictions on China are likely to be first applied to GAA, the next-generation technology that can overcome the limitations of the existing transistor structure, FinFET.
Regarding the issue, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) recently sent a draft GAA regulation to a technical advisory committee composed of industry experts.
This is the last step before introducing the regulation, but the actual regulation has not yet been finalized.
Industry insiders have criticized the GAA draft as being overly broad.
It remains unclear whether the GAA regulation focuses on limiting China’s ability to develop its own GAA chips or includes export restrictions to China from U.S. or foreign semiconductor companies, such as Samsung Electronics and Taiwan’s TSMC.
The U.S. government is in the process of determining the scope of potential rules, and it has not been decided when the final decision on the regulations will be made.
Sources explained, “The goal of the U.S. government is to make it more difficult for China to develop sophisticated computing systems necessary for building and operating AI models.” They added, “The U.S. government aims to block China’s access before the technology in the early stages is commercialized.”
Meanwhile, Samsung Electronics, Taiwan’s TSMC, NVIDIA, and Intel Corporation are planning to mass-produce semiconductors using GAA technology next year.
