The report, which cited people familiar with the matter, said the proposal is being opposed by officials from the Commerce Department.
Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) is a Shanghai-based, partly state-owned contract chipmaker, and China’s largest. It was added to the US 'Entity List' blacklist in December 2020, restricting its access to manufacturing equipment from US suppliers due to alleged ties to China’s military. It rejects these claims.
According to people familiar with the matter, its addition to the Entity List has proven ineffective at preventing it accessing important US technology. Under the current designation, SMIC is restricted from buying US technology “uniquely required” to build chips with 10nm circuits and smaller, which is near the leading edge of semiconductor manufacturing technology.
However, as many technologies can be used to produce semiconductors of varying size, exporters argued that they could...