In September, a patent for a new high-performance chip was released by a military institute in Beijing. This was the first indication of China’s attempt to reshape the half-trillion dollar global semiconductor business while defying US sanctions.

According to the patent application, the People’s Liberation Army’s Academy of Military Sciences has employed an open-source standard called RISC-V to lessen faults in chips for cloud computing and smart automobiles.

A computer language called RISC-V is used to construct everything from sophisticated processors for artificial intelligence to smartphone chips.

The two most widely used standards are Arm, created by Britain’s Arm Holdings and now owned by SoftBank Group, and x86, which is dominated by American companies Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

Only the most sophisticated x86 and Arm designs, which yield the highest-performance processors, may be sold to customers in China because to export restrictions imposed by the US and the UK.

RISC-V is an emerging architecture that makes up a small portion of the chip market, but its open-source nature has made it part of Beijing’s effort to reduce its reliance on Western technology as the U.S. tightens limits on China’s access to sophisticated semiconductors and chip-making equipment.

According to a report released in April by the Science and Technology Commission of the Shanghai government, “the biggest advantage of the RISC-V architecture is that it is geopolitically neutral.”

A Reuters review of over 100 Chinese-language academic articles, patents, government documents and tenders, as well as statements from research groups and companies, revealed that between 2018 and 2023, Beijing and dozens of Chinese state entities and research institutes—many of which were sanctioned by Washington—invested at least $50 million in projects involving RISC-V.

Although the number is small, Beijing thinks that the open-source standard may eventually challenge the x86-Arm duopoly because of recent RISC-V innovations and applications in China, many of which received government financing. This is according to state media. In response to inquiries regarding the situation, Arm refrained from commenting, as did AMD and Intel.

According to two industry figures and the previously undisclosed documents, RISC-V chips produced by Chinese companies and research institutes can now power self-driving cars, artificial intelligence models, and data storage centres.

An inquiry addressed through China’s State Council for comment was not answered by the military science academy.

Closed architectures, such as Arm and x86, are proprietary and require a licence fee from users. Their outlines span thousands of pages, containing intricate instructions and several versions that are incompatible and can only be altered by their developers.

Users can create own applications on top of the RISC-V framework, which is free to use and features a simplified architecture that frequently results in more energy-efficient devices.

China produced half of the more than 10 billion RISC-V chips that were sold worldwide by 2022, according to a study published in August by the state-run China Daily. In June of last year, Bao Yungang, the deputy director of China’s Institute of Computing Technology, stated at a chip conference that up to that time, at least $1.18 billion had been invested in RISC-V businesses in China.

A sales representative from a Beijing-based company that develops RISC-V processors stated, “The RISC-V ecosystem in China is the most mature globally,” citing the necessity for government and industry to develop technology that can avoid U.S. sanctions. The representative was not permitted to speak publicly.

RISC-V was the subject of 1,061 patents published in China last year, an increase from 10 in 2018, according to Anaqua’s AcclaimIP database. Although the U.S. had a comparable rise, China has published 2,508 of these patents compared to the U.S.’s 2,018.

There were no comments available on the issue from the fourth and fifth-largest filers – Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Huawei.

Since Arm is China’s most popular architecture, RISC-V is a long-term wager to protect Beijing in the event that Arm is compelled to stop licencing to all Chinese enterprises, as opposed to only Huawei, as it did momentarily in 2019.

Although Arm outperforms RISC-V processors in complicated computational tasks, the difference is narrowing as more tech businesses invest in the open-source standard and as RISC-V startups multiply, according to Richard Wawrzyniak, chief analyst at the market research firm SHD Group.

Over the past ten years, research at the University of California, Berkeley has produced RISC-V technology.

The non-profit foundation that controls the standard’s development, RISC-V International, relocated its headquarters from Delaware to Switzerland a few months after the Trump administration placed Huawei on a blacklist in May 2019.

The goal of the action, according to RISC-V International CEO Calista Redmond, is “to ensure continued ecosystem growth of the open standard for years to come,” not “to circumvent any legal restriction by any government,” as she told Reuters.

Nonetheless, the organisation notes on its website—without citing China—that the action reduced uncertainty because the RISC-V community expressed concerns “across 2018-2019” about the geopolitical picture.

In October, Reuters revealed that a number of US senators were pressuring the Biden administration to implement export limitations concerning RISC-V, a move that, according to Redmond, would impede the advancement of new and improved CPUs.

There were no comments on the issue from the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry Security.

China has been motivated to engage in the developing standard due to geopolitical considerations.

A symposium on how RISC-V could assist China in becoming tech self-sufficient was conducted in 2019 by researchers from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.

“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.

One of the most recent innovations in China was the automotive MCU chip that state-owned automaker Dongfeng Motor Corporation created last year using RISC-V to manage an automobile’s electronic systems.

Requests for comment from Dongfeng and the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology were not answered.

According to Reuters’ analysis, RISC-V has also been developed and promoted recently by universities and research centres connected to China’s military.

The PLA-run National University of Defence Technology and Peng Cheng Laboratory, which has collaborations with two or more defense-related institutions, were in the top 15 for RISC-V patents filed in China since 2018, according to AcclaimIP.

Researchers from Beihang University, whose scientists are involved in the construction of Chinese military aircraft and missiles, revealed the concept for a RISC-V processor that processes radar signals at an academic conference in November 2022.

A RISC-V processor to thwart a particular kind of cyberattack was co-developed by researchers at the Institute of Software of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), a state think tank, the previous year. The institute appears in government tenders as a PLA provider.

The second version of the RISC-V high-performance PC chip “Xiangshan” and the RISC-V operating system “Aolai” were introduced by the sanctioned CAS Institute of Computing Technology in May 2023.

The interest from the Chinese colleges and institutions, which remained silent when contacted, is similar to the U.S. government’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency’s ten-year investment in RISC-V research laboratories and businesses.

A representative for the CIA stated that although it did not actively finance the creation of the RISC-V architecture, it did support initiatives that “create prototype chips and test research hypotheses in the interests of U.S. national security” using the RISC-V design.

Though promising, RISC-V hasn’t managed to overthrow the dominance of Arm and x86 thus far. A RISC-V processor was expected to be present in 1.9% of all system-on-a-chip units shipped in 2022 by the SHD Group.

However, as the market for AI chips grows, several chipmakers are drawn to RISC-V because of its low cost, ease of modification, and energy efficiency.

The OEMs are interested in creating highly customised cores. And RISC-V truly fits that bill,” senior vice president of product management at Qualcomm, Ziad Asghar, stated in a September interview that was posted on the business’ website.

(Adapted from USNews.com)

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