Technology war: The USA wants to limit the participation of its companies in the RISC-V standard
According to analysts, a possible move by the United States to limit its companies' participation in RISC-V , an open-source chip design architecture that China is banking on to reduce dependence on foreign technologies, could intensify further the technological war between the two countries.
According to an article by SCMP , US lawmakers, including Republican and Democratic senators, are urging the Biden administration to take action on RISC-V for national security reasons.
RISC-V is an open-standard instruction set architecture (ISA) that gives chip developers the ability to configure and customize their designs. It has become a new hope for China to reduce its dependence on foreign intellectual property (IP) suppliers, precisely because of its open source nature, therefore free and free, in the escalating technology war with the United States.
Although Beijing and industry associations, including the China RISC-V Alliance, have not publicly responded to these rumors, Chinese analysts, experts and netizens were quick to comment.
Zhang Guobin, founder of Chinese semiconductor industry website eetrend.com, said in a statement on WeChat on Sunday that the move could create "a new battlefield in the chip war between the United States and China," based on current Washington's restrictions on mainland China's access to advanced chips and tools.
“RISC-V International moved its headquarters from the United States to Switzerland, but was unexpectedly targeted by American politicians,” Zhang wrote, referring to the non-profit foundation, composed of many members and aimed at promoting the open source chip architecture.
“If sanctions are actually implemented, the answer is still unclear in terms of which side [China or the United States] will develop better from this point,” wrote a user with the nickname “Qintian” on the electronic engineering forum EEWorld.
Although RISC-V originated in 2010 at the University of California, China has nevertheless embraced the standard as a possible solution to circumvent US technological restrictions, along with commercial considerations such as cost reduction and diversification from the British semiconductor design giant Arm.
Currently, Arm cannot sell some high-end IP to Chinese customers due to US restrictions. Meanwhile, U.S. electronics design automation company Synopsys can only supply a stripped-down version of its software to Chinese companies such as Huawei Technologies, according to a Synopsys engineer who spoke to the Post in June on the sidelines of a RISC event -V to Beijing.
Currently, the Intel-developed X86 is the dominant chip design architecture for desktop and laptop computers, while the design architecture of most smartphone chips in the world is controlled by Arm, owned by SoftBank Group Corp So the main architectures are controlled, however, either by the USA or their allies.
Of RISC-V International's 21 core members, nearly half are Chinese, including Alibaba Cloud, Huawei, ZTE and Tencent Holdings, according to the agency's website.
Meanwhile, China has created a national RISC-V alliance. Nine Chinese chip companies – including Alibaba Group Holding's T-Head unit and Shanghai-listed VeriSilicon Holdings – agreed in August to form an alliance that comes with the condition that members not sue each other over patent infringement. Alibaba owns the Post.
example of processor with four RISC-V cores
In theory, anyone can use the open-standard RISC-V ISA to design their own IP CPUs. In fact, many chip design companies have chosen to purchase commercial IP cores from companies like SiFive, Andes Technology, and Nuclei to shorten design times and reduce costs.
However, analysts said that any U.S. move to target RISC-V with restrictions would risk bifurcating the open-standard ISA increasingly used to design semiconductors in various industries, from automobiles to Internet-of-Things applications ( IoT).
According to Wilford, Chinese companies already account for 60-80% of startups using RISC-V. According to data from RISC-V Internati, global shipments of chips with RISC-V architecture exceeded 10 billion units in 2022, half of which came from China. Limiting the participation of US companies is intended to prevent the creation of a standard in which China can be dominant. Will the USA succeed?
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The article Technology war: the US wants to limit the participation of its companies in the RISC-V standard comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/guerra-tecnologica-gli-usa-vogliono-limitare-la-partecipazione-delle-proprie-aziende-allo-standard-risc-v/ on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 16:47:33 +0000.