China turns to open-source chips as US export controls increase

In September, a military institute located in Beijing unveiled a patent for an advanced chip, providing insight into China’s efforts to revolutionize the global chip market worth over half a trillion dollars and counter U.S. sanctions.

The People’s Liberation Army (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, a patent application shows.

RISC-V is an instruction set architecture, a computer language used to design anything from smartphone chips to advanced artificial intelligence processors.

The most common standards are controlled by Western companies: x86, controlled by US companies Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, and Arm, developed by British Arm Holdings, owned by SoftBank Group.

US and UK export restrictions prevent the sale of only the most advanced x86 and Arm models to customers in China, which produce the most powerful chips.

But as the United States expands restrictions on China’s access to advanced semiconductor and chip-making equipment, RISC-V’s open-source nature has made it part of Beijing’s plan to curb its reliance on Western technology, though the emerging architecture is only a fraction. from the chip market.

“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 released in April.

Beijing and dozens of Chinese state entities and research institutes, many of which have faced sanctions from Washington, will invest at least $50 million in RISC-V projects between 2018 and 2023, according to a Reuters review of more than 100 Chinese-language academic articles, patents and government documents. and tenders and statements from research groups and companies.

While the number is modest, recent breakthroughs and applications of RISC-V in China, many with state funding, have boosted 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.

RISC-V chips made by Chinese companies and research institutes can now power self-driving cars, artificial intelligence models and data storage centers, according to two industry figures and previously unreported documents.

The Academy of Military Sciences did not respond to a request for comment sent through the Chinese State Council.

A GROWING QUESTION

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 only their developers can modify.

RISC-V is free to use and has a simpler outline, often resulting in more energy-efficient chips, and users can build on top of the framework to suit their needs.

Half of the more than 10 billion RISC-V chips shipped worldwide by 2022 will be made in China, the state-run China Daily reported in August. Bao Yungang, deputy director of the China 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 so far.

“China’s RISC-V ecosystem is the most mature globally,” driven by the government and industry’s need to develop technology to circumvent U.S. sanctions, said a sales representative for a Beijing-based company that develops RISC-V chips. who was not authorized to speak in public.

About 1,061 RISC-V patents were published in China last year, up from 10 in 2018, Anaqua’s AcclaimIP database shows. The number of patents in the US increased accordingly, but China has issued 2,508 such patents, compared to 2,018 in the US.

Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Huawei, which neither responded to requests for comment, were the fourth and fifth largest issuers.

Arm is the dominant architecture in China, so RISC-V is a long-term bet to reassure Beijing against a scenario where Arm has to stop not only licensing to Huawei, as it did temporarily in 2019, but to all Chinese companies.

While the performance of RISC-V chips lags behind Arm’s for 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 market analyst at SHD Group. research company.

“THE REAL RISE TO POWER”

RISC-V technology was born in the last decade in the laboratories of the University of California, Berkeley.

A few months after the Trump administration blacklisted Huawei in May 2019, RISC-V International, the non-profit foundation overseeing the development of the standard, moved its headquarters from Delaware to Switzerland.

Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, told Reuters the move was not intended to “circumvent any government’s legal restrictions” but to “ensure the continued growth of the open standard ecosystem for years to come.”

However, the foundation says on its website that the change eased uncertainty because the RISC-V community was concerned about the geopolitical landscape in “2018-2019” without mentioning China.

Reuters reported in October that some US lawmakers urged the Biden administration to impose export restrictions around RISC-V, which Redmond said would slow the development of new and better chips.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Industrial Safety Agency declined to comment.

China has had a geopolitical incentive to invest in the rising standard.

In 2019, researchers from the University of Electronics and Technology of China held a seminar on how RISC-V could help China achieve technology self-sufficiency.

“Everyone agreed… if domestic chip systems want to get rid of the limitations of x86 and ARM architectures and make a real rise to power, RISC-V is the biggest opportunity,” says the seminar summary on the university’s website.

Among China’s recent breakthroughs, state-owned automaker Dongfeng Motor Corporation last year developed an automotive MCU chip used to control a car’s electronic systems using RISC-V.

Dongfeng and China’s Ministry of Science and Technology did not respond to requests for comment.

MILITARY ADVANTAGE

Universities and research institutes affiliated with China’s military have also developed and promoted RISC-V in recent years, a Reuters review noted.

According to AcclaimIP, the PLA-run National University of Defense Technology was among the top 15 in RISC-V patents filed in China as of 2018, as was Peng Cheng Laboratory, which has partnerships with at least two defense-related institutes.

At an academic conference in November 2022, researchers from Beihang University, whose researchers are involved in the development of Chinese military aircraft and missiles, presented the design of a RISC-V chip that processes radar signals.

A year earlier, researchers at the Software Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), a state think tank, jointly developed a RISC-V chip to thwart a type of cyberattack. The institute is a PLA supplier, state tenders show.

In May 2023, the US-sanctioned CAS Institute of Computing Technology announced the second-generation “Xiangshan”, a high-performance RISC-V PC chip, and “Aolai”, a RISC-V operating system.

The interest from Chinese institutes and universities, which did not respond to surveys, mirrors the US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency investment in RISC-V research labs and companies a decade ago.

An agency spokesman said that while it did not directly fund the development of the RISC-V architecture, it funded efforts that used RISC-V “to create chip prototypes and test research hypotheses in the name of US national security.”

Despite its promise, RISC-V has so far failed to break the dominance of x86 and Arm. SHD Group estimates that 1.9 percent of all system-on-a-chip units shipped in 2022 had a RISC-V processor.

But as demand for AI chips grows, RISC-V’s low cost, easy customization and energy efficiency have made it attractive to some chipmakers.

OEMs “want to develop highly customized cores. And RISC-V really fits that bill,” Ziad Asghar, Qualcomm’s director of product management, said in an interview published on the company’s website in September.

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