RISC-V is crucial for various applications, including smartphone chips and artificial intelligence processors.
The U.S.-China tech dispute is causing pressure on President Biden’s administration to restrict American companies from collaborating on RISC-V, an open-source chip technology widely used in China. This could potentially change global collaboration across international borders.
RISC-V is crucial for various applications, including smartphone chips and artificial intelligence processors. The debate centers around the competition between RISC-V and proprietary technology from British firm Arm Holdings.
Key figures, including two Republican House of Representatives committee chairmen, Republican Senator Marco Rubio, and Democratic Senator Mark Warner, are urging the Biden administration to take action concerning RISC-V, citing national security concerns.
Their apprehension stems from the belief that Beijing is leveraging a culture of open collaboration among American companies to propel its own semiconductor industry forward, potentially jeopardizing the current U.S. leadership in the chip sector and assisting China in modernizing its military capabilities.
Representative Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House select committee on China, emphasized the need for the Commerce Department to mandate “any American person or company to receive an export license prior to engaging with PRC (People’s Republic of China) entities on RISC-V technology.”
Calls to regulate RISC-V represent the latest episode in the U.S.-China skirmish over chip technology, which escalated last year with comprehensive export restrictions. The Biden administration has informed China of plans to update these restrictions this month.
Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, voiced his concerns, stating, “The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is abusing RISC-V to get around U.S. dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips. U.S. persons should not be supporting a PRC tech transfer strategy that serves to degrade U.S. export control laws.”
McCaul expressed his intent to seek action from the Bureau of Industry and Security, the branch of the Commerce Department overseeing export-control regulations. Should this not transpire, he is prepared to pursue legislative measures.
The Bureau “is constantly reviewing the technology landscape and threat environment, and continually assessing how best to apply our export control policies to protect national security and safeguard core technologies,” stated a Commerce Department spokesperson.
Senator Marco Rubio warned, “Communist China is developing open-source chip architecture to dodge our sanctions and grow its chip industry. If we don’t broaden our export controls to include this threat, China will one day surpass us as the global leader in chip design.”
Senator Mark Warner echoed these sentiments, asserting that the existing export-control laws are ill-equipped to address the challenge posed by open-source software in advanced semiconductor designs like RISC-V or in the field of artificial intelligence. He advocated for a paradigm shift.
RISC-V is overseen by a Swiss-based nonprofit foundation that facilitates collaboration among for-profit companies for technology development. Its origins lie in labs at the University of California, Berkeley, with subsequent support from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The creators liken it to freely available technologies like Ethernet and USB, harnessing contributions from around the world to expedite innovation.
While executives from China’s Huawei Technologies view RISC-V as pivotal in their nation’s progress in chip development, U.S. and allied companies have also embraced the technology. Chip giant Qualcomm, for instance, is collaborating with a consortium of European automotive firms on RISC-V chips. Alphabet’s Google has announced plans to make Android compatible with RISC-V chips.
Should the Biden administration heed the lawmakers’ calls to regulate U.S. companies’ involvement in the Swiss-based foundation, it could potentially complicate collaboration between American and Chinese firms on open technical standards. Additionally, it might pose obstacles to China’s pursuit of chip self-sufficiency, as well as to U.S. and European efforts to create more affordable and versatile chips.
Kevin Wolf, an export-control attorney at law firm Akin Gump who served in the Commerce Department under former President Barack Obama, suggested that while regulating the open discussion of technologies is less common than regulating physical products, it is not impossible. Existing rules on chip exports could potentially serve as a legal framework for such a proposal.