China bets on open-source chips as US export controls mount By Reuters

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<span>© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: A Chinese flag is displayed next to a “Made in China” sign seen on a printed circuit board with semiconductor chips, in this illustration picture taken February 17, 2023. REUTERS/Florence Lo/Illustration/File Photo</span><br />
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<p>By Eduardo Baptista</p>
<p>BEIJING (Reuters) – When a Beijing-based military institute in September published a patent for a new high-performance chip, it offered a glimpse of China’s bid to remake the half-trillion dollar global chip market and withstand U.S. sanctions.</p>
<p>The People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Academy of Military Sciences had used an open-source standard known as RISC-V to reduce malfunctions in chips for cloud computing and smart cars, the patent filing shows. </p>
<p>RISC-V is an instruction set architecture, a computer language used to design anything from smartphone chips to advanced processors for artificial intelligence. </p>
<p>The most common standards are controlled by Western companies: x86, dominated by U.S. firms Intel (NASDAQ:) and Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:), and <span itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Corporation"><span itemprop="name"> Arm </span></span>, developed by Britain’s Arm Holdings (NASDAQ:), owned by SoftBank (TYO:) Group.</p>
<p>U.S. and UK export controls prevent the sale of only the most advanced x86 and Arm designs – which produce the highest-performance chips – to clients in China.</p>
<p>But as the U.S. widens restrictions on China’s access to advanced semiconductors and chip-making equipment, the open-source nature of RISC-V has made it part of Beijing’s plan to curb its dependence on Western technology, although the emerging architecture accounts for a fraction of the chip market.</p>
<p>“The biggest advantage of the RISC-V architecture is that it is geopolitically neutral,” the Shanghai government’s Science and Technology Commission said in a report published in April.</p>
<p>Beijing and dozens of Chinese state entities and research institutes, many sanctioned by Washington, invested at least $50 million in projects involving RISC-V between 2018 and 2023, according to a Reuters review of over 100 Chinese-language academic articles, patents, government documents and tenders, as well as statements from research groups and companies.</p>
<p>While the figure is modest, recent RISC-V breakthroughs and applications in China, many with government funding, have raised Beijing’s hopes that the open-source standard could one day threaten the x86-Arm duopoly, according to state media. Intel and AMD did not respond to questions about the matter, while Arm declined to comment.</p>
<p>RISC-V chips made by Chinese firms and research institutes can now power self-driving cars, artificial-intelligence models and data-storage centres, according to two industry figures and the previously unreported documents.</p>
<p>The military science academy did not respond to a request for comment sent via China’s State Council.</p>
<p>GROWING MATURITY</p>
<p>Arm and x86 are closed architectures, meaning they are proprietary and charge users a license fee. Their outlines are thousands of pages long, with complex instructions and numerous incompatible versions that can only be modified by their developers.</p>
<p>RISC-V is free to use and has a simpler outline, often leading to more energy-efficient chips, and users can build atop the framework to suit their needs.</p>
<p>Half of the more than 10 billion RISC-V chips shipped globally by 2022 were made in China, the state-run China Daily reported in August. Bao Yungang, deputy director of China’s Institute of Computing Technology, told a chip conference last June that funding for RISC-V startups in China had reached at least $1.18 billion to that point.</p>
<p>“The RISC-V ecosystem in China is the most mature globally”, a result of the need of government and industry to develop technology that can circumvent U.S. sanctions, said a sales representative from a Beijing-based company that develops RISC-V chips, who was not authorised to speak publicly.</p>
<p>Some 1,061 patents involving RISC-V were published in China last year, up from 10 in 2018, Anaqua’s AcclaimIP database shows. While the U.S. saw a similar increase, 2,508 such patents have been published in China, to the U.S.’s 2,018. </p>
<p>Chinese tech giants <span itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Corporation"><span itemprop="name"> Alibaba </span></span> (NYSE:) and Huawei, neither of which responded to requests for comment, were the fourth- and fifth-largest filers.</p>
<p>Arm is the dominant architecture in China, so RISC-V is a long-term bet to insure Beijing against a scenario in which Arm is forced to not just halt licensing to Huawei, as it did temporarily in 2019, but to all Chinese companies.</p>
<p>While the performance of RISC-V chips lags Arm in complex computing tasks, the gap is closing as RISC-V startups proliferate and more tech companies invest in the open-source standard, said Richard Wawrzyniak, principal analyst at the SHD Group, a market research firm.</p>
<p>‘TRUE RISE TO POWER’</p>
<p>RISC-V technology emerged last decade from labs at the University of California, Berkeley. </p>
<p>A few months after Huawei was blacklisted by the Trump administration in May 2019, RISC-V International, a non-profit foundation that oversees development of the standard, moved its headquarters from Delaware to Switzerland.</p>
<p>Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, told Reuters the move was not to “circumvent any legal restriction by any government” but “to ensure continued ecosystem growth of the open standard for years to come”.</p>
<p>Still, the foundation says on its website that the move alleviated uncertainty as there was concern from the RISC-V community “across 2018-2019” related to the geopolitical landscape, without mentioning China.</p>
<p>Reuters reported in October that some U.S. lawmakers were urging the Biden administration to impose export restrictions around RISC-V, a move that Redmond has said would slow the development of new and better chips.</p>
<p>The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry Security declined to comment.</p>
<p>For China, there has been a geopolitical incentive to invest in the emerging standard.</p>
<p>In 2019, researchers at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China organised a seminar on how RISC-V could help China achieve tech self-sufficiency.</p>
<p>“Everyone agreed…if domestic chip systems want to get rid of the limitations of x86 and ARM architectures and realise a true rise to power, RISC-V will be the biggest opportunity,” says a summary of the seminar published on the university’s website.</p>
<p>Among recent breakthroughs in China, state-owned car maker Dongfeng Motor Corporation last year developed an automotive MCU chip, used to control the electronic systems of a car, using RISC-V. </p>
<p>Dongfeng and China’s Ministry of Science and Technology did not respond to requests for comment.</p>
<p>MILITARY INTEREST </p>
<p>Universities and research institutes linked to China’s military have also developed and promoted RISC-V in recent years, Reuters’ review found.</p>
<p>The PLA-run National University of Defense Technology was in the top 15 for RISC-V patents filed in China since 2018, according to AcclaimIP, as was Peng Cheng Laboratory, which has partnerships with at least two defence-related institutes.</p>
<p>At an academic conference in November 2022, researchers at Beihang University, whose scientists are involved in the development of Chinese military aircraft and missiles, presented the design for a RISC-V chip that processes radar signals.</p>
<p>The year prior, researchers at the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), a state think tank, co-developed a RISC-V chip to prevent a type of cyberattack. The institute is a PLA supplier, government tenders show.</p>
<p>In May 2023, the CAS Institute of Computing Technology, which is under U.S. sanctions, unveiled the second generation of “Xiangshan”, a RISC-V high-performance PC chip, and “Aolai”, a RISC-V operating system.</p>
<p>Interest from the Chinese institutes and universities, which did not respond to queries, echoes investment in RISC-V research labs and companies a decade ago by the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.</p>
<p>An agency spokesperson said that while it did not directly fund the development of the RISC-V architecture, it funded efforts that used RISC-V to “create prototype chips and test research hypotheses in the interests of U.S. national security”.</p>
<p>Despite its promise, RISC-V so far has not broken x86 and Arm’s dominance. The SHD Group estimated that 1.9% of all system-on-a-chip units shipped in 2022 had a RISC-V processor.</p>
<p>But with demand for AI chips growing, RISC-V’s low cost, ease of customisation and energy efficiency have made it attractive to some chipmakers.</p>
<p>Original equipment manufacturers “want to develop highly customized cores. And RISC-V really fits that bill,” Ziad Asghar, Qualcomm (NASDAQ:)’s senior vice president of product management, said in an interview published on the company’s website in September.</p>
<p>($1 = 7.1497 renminbi) </p>
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