RISC-V Chips Become Latest Arena in US-China Tech Conflict

The Biden administration is under pressure from certain lawmakers to limit the involvement of American companies in a chip technology that is widely utilized in China. This development could potentially disrupt the global technology industry’s cross-border collaborations.

It’s RISC-V, pronounced “risk five,” an open-source technology that competes with expensive proprietary technology from British semiconductor and software engineering company Arm Holdings. RISC-V can be used as a key ingredient in everything from smartphone chips to advanced AI processors.

Some lawmakers — including two Republican House committee chairmen, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio and Democratic Sen. Mark Warner — are calling for the Biden administration to take action on RISC-V, citing national security reasons.

Lawmakers expressed concern that Beijing is exploiting the culture of open cooperation between American companies to advance its own semiconductor industry, which could erode the current US lead in chips and help China modernize its military. Their comments are the first major attempt to limit US companies’ work on RISC-V.

Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House China Affairs Committee, said in a statement to Reuters that the Commerce Department “must obtain an export authorization from any American person or company before entering into a contract with entities of the People’s Republic of China. RISC-V technology.”

Such demands to regulate RISC-V are the latest in a US-China battle over chip technology that escalated last year with sweeping export restrictions that the Biden administration has told China it will update this month.

“The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is abusing RISC-V to circumvent US dominance in the intellectual property needed to design chips. The US should not support China’s technology transfer strategy to undermine US export control laws,” Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement to Reuters.

McCaul said he wants action from the Bureau of Industry and Security, the part of the Commerce Department that oversees export control regulations, and will pursue legislation if it doesn’t materialize.

The agency “continually reviews the technology landscape and threat environment and continually evaluates how best to apply our export control policies to safeguard national security and nuclear technology,” a Commerce Department spokeswoman said in a statement.

“Communist China is developing open-source chip architecture to evade our sanctions and grow its chip industry,” Rubio said in a statement to Reuters. “If we don’t expand our export controls to address this threat, China will one day overtake us as the world leader in chip design.”

“My fear is that our export control laws are not ready to meet the challenge of open source software – whether it’s advanced semiconductor designs like RISC-V or in the field of artificial intelligence – and a dramatic paradigm shift is needed,” Warner said. in a statement to Reuters.

RISC-V is overseen by a Swiss non-profit foundation that coordinates the efforts of for-profit companies to develop the technology.

The RISC-V technology came from the University of California, Berkeley labs and later benefited from funding from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its creators have compared it to Ethernet, USB, and even the Internet, which are freely available and use donations from around the world to make innovation faster and cheaper.

HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES

The leaders of China’s Huawei Technologies have embraced RISC-V as a pillar of the country’s progress in developing its own chips. But the U.S. and its allies have also jumped on the technology bandwagon: chip giant Qualcomm is working with a group of European auto companies on RISC-V chips, and Alphabet’s Google has said it will make Android, the world’s most popular mobile operating system, run on RISC-V chips.

Qualcomm declined to comment. Its executives said in August that they believe RISC-V will accelerate chip innovation and change the technology industry.

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

If the Biden administration regulates U.S. companies’ participation in the Swiss foundation as lawmakers hope, the move could make it harder for American and Chinese companies to work together on open technical standards. It could also create obstacles to China’s drive to seek chip self-sufficiency, as well as US and European efforts to create cheaper and more versatile chips.

Jack Kang, director of business development at SiFive, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup that uses RISC-V, said the potential U.S. government restrictions on American companies using RISC-V would be “a huge tragedy.”

“It would be like banning us from working on the Internet,” Kang said. “It would be a huge mistake in terms of technology, leadership, innovation and the businesses and jobs we create.”

Regulating the open discussion of technologies is less common than regulating physical products, but not impossible, said Kevin Wolf, an export control lawyer at the law firm Akin Gump who worked at the Commerce Department under former President Barack Obama. Current rules governing chip exports could help create a legal framework for such a proposal, Wolf said.

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