A bipartisan group of U.S. senators has proposed a new law that would impose an almost blanked ban on exports of advanced wafer fabrication equipment to select entities in adversary nations. The proposal would complement existing fab-based restrictions and would target leading China-based chipmakers including CXMT, Hua Hong, SMIC, and YMTC, with Huawei also identified in the legislative text. The measure is intended to stop these companies from buying advanced tools for older fabs and then using them to strengthen more advanced manufacturing lines.
Current U.S. restrictions require export licenses for wafer fabrication equipment capable of 14nm process technologies for logic, 18nm-class DRAM fabrication processes, and 128-layer or more NAND when shipped to China-based entities. Those rules focus on individual fabs rather than the companies that own them. That has allowed equipment makers to ship advanced systems, such as the ASML Twinscan NXT:1950i/1980Di, to companies like SMIC so long as they are not formally designated for advanced process technologies. The proposal argues that this structure is difficult to enforce, particularly because audits of tool usage are hard to carry out, while such equipment has reportedly been used for 7nm-class process technologies including SMIC’s N+1 and N+2.
The newly proposed MATCH Act would move to a hybrid model that is company-based and affiliation-based while keeping fab-level triggers in place. That change would prevent companies like SMIC from purchasing advanced tools for trailing-node fabs and redirecting them to facilities capable of more advanced production. The bill is also designed to stop circumvention through intermediaries by attaching controls to end-use, end-user, reexport, and servicing, not just the initial sale. That approach is meant to make diversion riskier and to limit continued operation of restricted equipment by threatening future access to servicing, which would render these machines useless over time.
The proposal also seeks tighter coordination with allied supplier countries including the Netherlands, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. If that effort fails, the U.S. would expand restrictions extraterritorially to cover foreign-made tools that contain more than 0% of American technology, or require servicing that relies on American technologies. In parallel, the bill introduces the 75% threshold as a mechanism to decide when controls should remain in place. If China can meet 75% of its demand for certain tools, then the U.S. government would no longer restrict shipments of those tools to China, a provision that could become significant for etching and deposition equipment as Chinese suppliers scale up.
