Chip design software and hardware maker Cadence Design Systems agreed to plead guilty to unlawfully exporting semiconductor design tools to a restricted Chinese military university, the Department of Justice said in a statement. The California firm will pay over $140 million in criminal and civil pines and forfeitures, marking the latest effort by U.S. officials to restrict the flow of chip designs.
Cadence had accepted responsibility for “exporting sensitive semiconductor design tools,” the DOJ said in its announcement Monday, without offering further details. The National University of Defense Technology in China had been added to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Entity List in 2015 due to what the DOJ described as the organization’s “use of U.S.-origin components to produce supercomputers believed to support nuclear explosive simulation and military simulation activities.”
