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Comment by sparker72678 | Hacker News Reader

> Announced Friday by the US Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) and enacted today, the rule will ban the export of two ultra-wide bandgap semiconductor materials, as well as some types of electronic computer-aided design (ECAD) technology and pressure gain combustion (PGC) technology.

> In particular, the BIS said that the semiconductor materials gallium oxide and diamond will be subject to renewed export controls because they can operate under more extreme temperature and voltage conditions. The Bureau said that capability makes the materials more useful in weapons.

Do SaaS providers of these kinds of software now have to kick off Chinese customers?

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Aside: the press release is a bit more specific than all ECAD software, the language it uses is "Electronic Computer-Aided Design (ECAD) software specially designed for the development of integrated circuits with Gate-All-Around Field-Effect Transistor (GAAFET) structure".[1]

I'm not all that clued up on the latest in chip manufacturing, but GAAFET seems like a fairly cutting edge thing used only in high-end modern chips, and I wouldn't be surprised if many ECAD softare packages are unaffected (but again, this is not my field, so could be 100% wrong there, which I am sure people will point out).

[1]: https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/documents/about-bis/newsro...

I used to work for an ECAD company, very few customers used 3nm, maybe there are more now, but I don’t know what GAAFET would be used for

GAAFET is the next step after FinFET to allow such small transistors to be feasible.

SaaS? The ban is all about hardware and materials.

ECAD is software.

Code is speech.

not all speech is protected

All code is protected as speech https://twitter.com/EFF/status/1559224417674137600

That doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with it. Publishing and running code are very different things. Additionally, the major code hosts are not bound by free speech laws.

Not all code is speech.

Not all speech is code

If there is a ban and ECAD is included in the ban, then yes, they must kick off Chinese customers

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