China’s RISC-V community shrugs off US lawmaker threats to impose curbs on open-source chip standard
- None of the Chinese premier members in RISC-V International have made any comment in response to reports that US lawmakers want a crackdown
- One expert says US curbs would not have direct impact on mainland RISC-V companies but may have a ‘negative impact’ on IP vendors in the US
China’s RISC-V community has largely ignored potential US moves to restrict the mainland’s access to the open-source chip design technology, with Chinese experts downplaying the likely implications of such a course of action.
None of the Chinese premier members in RISC-V International, including Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Technologies, ZTE Corp and Tencent Holdings, have made any comment in response to reports that both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have urged the Biden administration to curb China and US corporate-level cooperation on RISC-V technologies.
RISC-V is an open-standard instruction set architecture (ISA) which gives chip developers the ability to configure and customise their designs. It has become a new hope for China to reduce its dependence on foreign intellectual property (IP) suppliers amid a tech war with the US and as it seeks to reduce the costs involved in chip design. RISC-V International is the non-profit, member foundation aimed at promoting the architecture.
Peng Jianying, CEO of Nuclei System Technology, a leading RISC-V processor IP vendor in China, told the South China Morning Post that the impact would be limited as the US can only seek to restrict the exports of US companies to China or cooperation with China, as it would be hard to set any restrictions on the open standard.
Tech war could intensify if US targets RISC-V chip standard with China curbs
Peng, who is also general secretary of CRVIC, a Chinese RISC-V alliance, said US restrictions would not have a direct impact on mainland RISC-V companies but may have a “negative impact” on IP vendors in the US.
Jack Kang, a senior vice-president at SiFive, another RISC-V IP company, said RISC-V, like other open standards such as Linux, Ethernet, and Wi-fi, are critical to “technological innovation and growth”.
“There seems to be confusion over the RISC-V open-standard and the actual technology products that are under relevant export laws already,” said Kang.
Commercial RISC-V IP sellers such as SiFive are already subject to restrictions in doing business with US-sanctioned Chinese firms. Kang said previously that SiFive cannot sell its RISC-V IPs to Chinese companies that have been blacklisted by being added to the US Entity List. However, SiFive sees great potential in China, especially in automobile chips where demand has been fuelled by a thriving electric vehicle sector.
Sophie Teng, former secretary general of CRVIC, the biggest RISC-V association in China with over 100 company members, said at best, the US may be able to restrict some RISC-V-based codes that are produced in the US, or sales of RISC-V commercial IPs by US firms to the mainland.
Teng said the RISC-V International offers a platform for its members to cooperate and compete, with each trying to get their technology road maps and initiatives incorporated into the standards.
The China RISC-V Alliance (CRVA), administered by the official Institute of Computing Technology, on Tuesday republished a translated statement from the Switzerland-based RISC-V International, stating that “RISC-V International does not provide chip design, open source cores, proprietary IP, or implementations, but rather publishes a set of commonly-used global open standards.”
RISC-V International publishes an open-standard ISA based on US-origin reduced instruction set computer (RISC) principles, first developed by UC Berkeley professor David Patterson in 1980. Over the years it evolved through four versions, from RISC-I to RISC-IV, before the advent of open-source RISC-V in 2015. Since then, its global popularity has grown due to its open-source nature.
The standard offers China, the world’s top chip-importing country and currently embroiled in an escalating technology war with the US, the first open-standard foundation for semiconductor design.
China Mobile, the country’s biggest telecoms operator, on Thursday launched its first modem based on a 64-bit RISC-V core chip made on a 22-nanometre process.
The Intel-developed X86 remains the dominant chip design architecture for desktop and laptop computers, but Intel does not license out its X86, while the design architecture behind most smartphone chips in the world is controlled by British firm Arm.
