China Leverages RISC-V Architecture, Countering US Tech Dominance

In September, a Beijing-based military institute published a patent for a new high-performance processor, providing a sneak peek at China's attempt to reshape the half-trillion-dollar global semiconductor market and evade U.S. sanctions.

Open-Source Chips: China's Response to Mounting U.S. Export Controls Revealed

According to the patent application, the People's Liberation Army's (PLA) 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, as per Reuters.

Western corporations control the most common standards: Arm, invented by Britain's Arm Holdings and owned by SoftBank Group (9984.T), opens a new tab; x86, dominated by U.S. businesses Intel (INTC.O) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O), opens new tab.

Export restrictions imposed by the U.S. and the U.K. make it impossible to supply China with chips that are only the most sophisticated x86 and Arm designs, which yield the maximum performance.

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.

"The biggest advantage of the RISC-V architecture is that it is geopolitically neutral," the Science and Technology Commission of the Shanghai government stated.

Between 2018 and 2023, at least $50 million was invested in RISC-V projects by Beijing and dozens of Chinese state entities and research institutes, many of which were sanctioned by Washington. This information came from a review conducted of over 100 Chinese-language academic articles, patents, government documents, and tenders, as well as statements from research groups and companies.

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.

Two industry figures and the previously undisclosed documents claim that RISC-V processors produced by Chinese companies and research institutes can currently power self-driving cars, artificial intelligence models, and data storage centers.

RISC-V's Rise in China: A Strategic Shift Towards Open-Source Chip Architecture

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

Users can create their 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.

"The RISC-V ecosystem in China is the most mature globally," according to a sales representative from a Beijing-based business that creates RISC-V chips, who asked not to be named publicly, is the outcome of the necessity for government and industry to develop technology that can get beyond U.S. sanctions.

Anaqua's AcclaimIP database indicates that there were 1,061 RISC-V-related patents published in China last year, compared to just 10 in 2018. Despite a comparable rise in the United States, China has published 2,508 of these patents compared to the United States in 2018.

The fourth and fifth-largest filers were Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Huawei, which did not reply to requests for comment.

Since Arm is the most popular architecture in China, RISC-V is a long-term wager made by Beijing to protect itself from a situation in which Arm is compelled to stop licensing to all Chinese enterprises, rather than just Huawei, as it did temporarily in 2019.

According to Richard Wawrzyniak, chief analyst at market research firm SHD Group, while RISC-V processors still perform worse than Arm in complicated computing workloads, this difference is narrowing as more tech businesses invest in the open-source standard and as RISC-V startups become more numerous.

RISC-V Gains Momentum: Navigating Geopolitics in Global Chip Innovation

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.

RISC-V International CEO Calista Redmond said that the decision was not to "circumvent any legal restriction by any government" but "to ensure continued ecosystem growth of the open standard for years to come."

Nonetheless, the organization 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, they revealed that a number of U.S. 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.

The Bureau of Industry Security of the U.S. Department of Commerce declined to comment.

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

Researchers from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China organized a symposium in 2019 on how RISC-V could assist China in becoming tech self-sufficient.

According to a synopsis of the seminar posted on the university's webpage, "Everyone agreed…if domestic chip systems want to get rid of the limitations of x86 and ARM architectures and realize a true rise to power, RISC-V will be the biggest opportunity."

Among recent innovations in China, state-owned automaker Dongfeng Motor Corporation created an automotive MCU chip last year that uses RISC-V to operate an automobile's electronic systems. Dongfeng or the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology did not answer requests for comments.

RISC-V's Strategic Role: Powering Innovation and Defense in China's Tech Ambitions​

In recent years, RISC-V has also been developed and supported by universities and research organizations associated with China's military.

According to AcclaimIP, the PLA-run National University of Defense Technology and Peng Cheng Laboratory, which collaborates with two or more defense-related institutions, have been among the top 15 for RISC-V patents filed in China since 2018.

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.

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

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

Although it did not actively finance the creation of the RISC-V architecture, an agency representative stated that it did fund initiatives that made use of RISC-V to "create prototype chips and test research hypotheses in the interests of U.S. national security."

RISC-V has shown potential but hasn't been able to overthrow Arm and x86 yet. The SHD Group expected a RISC-V processor to be present in 1.9% of all system-on-a-chip units shipped in 2022.

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

Original equipment makers "want to develop highly customized cores. And RISC-V really fits that bill," Ziad Asghar, Senior vice president of product management at Qualcomm, stated in September.

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