The US Commerce Department is investigating what they say are the “risks” of China accessing technology. RISC-Vthe platform free, open chip manufacturing and with royalty-free use, which is increasingly important in the technology industry.
RISC-V is the most promising project in the search for what they call the Open Source processor. Or what is the same, a new open source chip design based on the RISC architecture that offers a more economical (and open) way of manufacturing semiconductors for current applications and all the new technologies that have arrived (and are yet to come). ) in autonomous vehicles, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality or data centers.
Emerged at the Californian University of Berkeley, today it is in the hands of a Foundation based in Switzerland, where it moved from the United States in 2019 for what they said was “free yourself from the clutches of Donald Trump”. It should be noted that among the hundreds of companies, entities and organizations of the Foundation, there are many companies outside the United States such as the European chip manufacturer NXP Semiconductors, the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group or Huawei Technologies.
RISC-V, a huge future that some want to control
US lawmakers have long trying to control what will be a consistent alternative to the current platforms, x86 and ARM. Although the platform is not currently popular in mainstream computing products, the standard has very high potential for most processor use cases. And they want to limit China’s access:
“The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is abusing RISC-V to circumvent US dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips”assured the president of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives in his first attack to China’s access to RISC-V. 18 US lawmakers from both houses of Congress pressured the Biden administration to adopt plans to prevent China “managed to become dominant in RISC-V technology and take advantage of that dominance at the expense of the national and economic security of the United States”. This is not the first time, as we said, of blockade attempts that already arose in the Trump era.
The arguments are the same and so are the risks.. The Commerce Department also noted that it would have to act carefully to avoid harming U.S. companies that are part of international groups working on RISC-V technology. Previous controls on the transfer of 5G technology to China created obstacles for those companies working in international standards bodies in which China also participated, putting US leadership in this field at risk.
Furthermore, the executive management of RISC-V International has recalled the value of open standards without obstacles: «RISC-V is an open standard and has incorporated significant contributions from around the world. As a global standard, RISC-V is not controlled by any company or country.. The change of headquarters of the RISC-V Foundation five years ago was carried out precisely to avoid the control of any country and the maintenance of its identity: free, open chip manufacturing without payment of royalties.
