Tokyo, Dec. 20 (Jiji Press)–The Diet, Japan’s parliament, on Monday enacted bills to allow the government to financially support the domestic production of semiconductors, in a bid to secure supplies of security-linked high-performance chips.

The House of Councillors, the upper chamber of the Diet, voted to approve the two bills, designed to create a law on promoting the development and introduction of systems to utilize advanced telecommunication technology and to revise the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, or NEDO, law.

The new law and the revised law will enter into force by the end of fiscal 2021, or March 2022.

Under a new program created through the bills, the industry ministry will approve semiconductor makers’ plans to develop domestic production facilities and provide subsidies to them over multiple fiscal years.

The subsidies will be paid from a fund to be set up at NEDO to cover up to half of the necessary costs.

For the NEDO fund, 617 billion yen has been included in the government’s fiscal 2021 supplementary budget, which also cleared the Diet on Monday.

The new subsidy program is expected to apply first to a project of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s leading semiconductor contract manufacturer, to build a new plant in the town of Kikuyo, Kumamoto Prefecture, southwestern Japan.

With Sony Group Corp. <6758> joining the project, the Taiwanese maker aims to start construction of the plant in 2022 and launch production there by late 2024.