Insight: China bets on open-source chips as US export controls mount

China Mobile

05/02/2024 02:00

By Eduardo Baptista
       BEIJING, Feb 5 (Reuters) - When a Beijing-based military
institute in September published a patent for a new
high-performance chip, it offered a glimpse of China's bid to
remake the half-trillion dollar global chip market and withstand
U.S. sanctions.
    The People's Liberation Army's (PLA) Academy of Military
Sciences had used an open-source standard known as RISC-V to
reduce malfunctions in chips for cloud computing and smart cars,
the patent filing shows. 
    RISC-V is an instruction set architecture, a computer
language used to design anything from smartphone chips to
advanced processors for artificial intelligence. 
    The most common standards are controlled by Western
companies: x86, dominated by U.S. firms Intel  INTC.O  and
Advanced Micro Devices  AMD.O , and Arm  ARM.O , developed by
Britain's Arm Holdings, owned by SoftBank Group  9984.T .
    U.S. and UK export controls prevent the sale of only the
most advanced x86 and Arm designs - which produce the
highest-performance chips - to clients in China.
    But as the U.S. widens restrictions on China's access to
advanced semiconductors and chip-making equipment, the
open-source nature of RISC-V has made it part of Beijing's plan
to curb its dependence on Western technology, although the
emerging architecture accounts for a fraction of the chip
market.
    "The biggest advantage of the RISC-V architecture is that it
is geopolitically neutral," the Shanghai government's Science
and Technology Commission said in a report published in April.
    Beijing and dozens of Chinese state entities and research
institutes, many sanctioned by Washington, invested at least $50
million in projects involving RISC-V between 2018 and 2023,
according to a Reuters review of over 100 Chinese-language
academic articles, patents, government documents and tenders, as
well as statements from research groups and companies.
    While the figure is modest, recent RISC-V breakthroughs and
applications in China, many with government funding, have raised
Beijing's hopes that the open-source standard could one day
threaten the x86-Arm duopoly, according to state media. Intel
and AMD did not respond to questions about the matter, while Arm
declined to comment.
    RISC-V chips made by Chinese firms and research institutes
can now power self-driving cars, artificial-intelligence models
and data-storage centres, according to two industry figures and
the previously unreported documents.
    The military science academy did not respond to a request
for comment sent via China's State Council.
    
    GROWING MATURITY
    Arm and x86 are closed architectures, meaning they are
proprietary and charge users a license fee. Their outlines are
thousands of pages long, with complex instructions and numerous
incompatible versions that can only be modified by their
developers.
    RISC-V is free to use and has a simpler outline, often
leading to more energy-efficient chips, and users can build atop
the framework to suit their needs.
    Half of the more than 10 billion RISC-V chips shipped
globally by 2022 were made in China, the state-run China Daily
reported in August. Bao Yungang, deputy director of China's
Institute of Computing Technology, told a chip conference last
June that funding for RISC-V startups in China had reached at
least $1.18 billion to that point.
    "The RISC-V ecosystem in China is the most mature globally",
a result of the need of government and industry to develop
technology that can circumvent U.S. sanctions, said a sales
representative from a Beijing-based company that develops RISC-V
chips, who was not authorised to speak publicly.
    Some 1,061 patents involving RISC-V were published in China
last year, up from 10 in 2018, Anaqua's AcclaimIP database
shows. While the U.S. saw a similar increase, 2,508 such patents
have been published in China, to the U.S.'s 2,018. 
    Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Huawei, neither of which
responded to requests for comment, were the fourth- and
fifth-largest filers.
    Arm is the dominant architecture in China, so RISC-V is a
long-term bet to insure Beijing against a scenario in which Arm
is forced to not just halt licensing to Huawei, as it did
temporarily in 2019, but to all Chinese companies.
    While the performance of RISC-V chips lags Arm in complex
computing tasks, the gap is closing as RISC-V startups
proliferate and more tech companies invest in the open-source
standard, said Richard Wawrzyniak, principal analyst at the SHD
Group, a market research firm.
    
    'TRUE RISE TO POWER'
    RISC-V technology emerged last decade from labs at the
University of California, Berkeley. 
    A few months after Huawei was blacklisted by the Trump
administration in May 2019, RISC-V International, a non-profit
foundation that oversees development of the standard, moved its
headquarters from Delaware to Switzerland.
    Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, told Reuters
the move was not to "circumvent any legal restriction by any
government" but "to ensure continued ecosystem growth of the
open standard for years to come".
    Still, the foundation says on its website that the move
alleviated uncertainty as there was concern from the RISC-V
community "across 2018-2019" related to the geopolitical
landscape, without mentioning China.
    Reuters reported in October that some U.S. lawmakers were
urging the Biden administration to impose export restrictions
around RISC-V, a move that Redmond has said would slow the
development of new and better chips.
    The U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry
Security declined to comment.
    For China, there has been a geopolitical incentive to invest
in the emerging standard.
    In 2019, researchers at the University of Electronic Science
and Technology of China organised a seminar on how RISC-V could
help China achieve tech self-sufficiency.
    "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.
    Among recent breakthroughs in China, state-owned car maker
Dongfeng Motor Corporation last year developed an automotive MCU
chip, used to control the electronic systems of a car, using
RISC-V. 
    Dongfeng and China's Ministry of Science and Technology did
not respond to requests for comment.
            
    MILITARY INTEREST 
        Universities and research institutes linked to China's
military have also developed and promoted RISC-V in recent
years, Reuters' review found.
    The PLA-run National University of Defense Technology was in
the top 15 for RISC-V patents filed in China since 2018,
according to AcclaimIP, as was Peng Cheng Laboratory, which has
partnerships with at least two defence-related institutes.
    At an academic conference in November 2022, researchers at
Beihang University, whose scientists are involved in the
development of Chinese military aircraft and missiles, presented
the design for a RISC-V chip that processes radar signals.
    The year prior, researchers at the Institute of Software at
the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), a state think tank,
co-developed a RISC-V chip to prevent a type of cyberattack. The
institute is a PLA supplier, government tenders show.
    In May 2023, the CAS Institute of Computing Technology,
which is under U.S. sanctions, unveiled the second generation of
"Xiangshan", a RISC-V high-performance PC chip, and "Aolai", a
RISC-V operating system.
    Interest from the Chinese institutes and universities, which
did not respond to queries, echoes investment in RISC-V research
labs and companies a decade ago by the U.S. government's Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency.
    An agency spokesperson said that while it did not directly
fund the development of the RISC-V architecture, it funded
efforts that used RISC-V to "create prototype chips and test
research hypotheses in the interests of U.S. national security".
    Despite its promise, RISC-V so far has not broken x86 and
Arm's dominance. The SHD Group estimated that 1.9% of all
system-on-a-chip units shipped in 2022 had a RISC-V processor.
    But with demand for AI chips growing, RISC-V's low cost,
ease of customisation and energy efficiency have made it
attractive to some chipmakers.
    Original equipment manufacturers "want to develop highly
customized cores. And RISC-V really fits that bill," Ziad
Asghar, Qualcomm's senior vice president of product management,
said in an interview published on the company's website in
September.
    
($1 = 7.1497 Chinese yuan renminbi)

 (Reporting by Eduardo Baptista and Beijing newsroom; editing by
David Crawshaw)
 ((mailto:Eduardo.MonteiroBaptista@thomsonreuters.com;))