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US Lawmakers Reportedly Moving Towards Blocking RISC-V Access To China
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US Lawmakers Reportedly Moving Towards Blocking RISC-V Access To China
With "shocking" tech developments in China, US lawmakers are striving towards sanctioning the spread of the widely popular "RISC-V" technology to China.
US is Fearful About Technology Transfer To China Amid The Recent Developments in Rival's Tech Industry
A quick background recap on RISC-V architecture: it is an open-source standard primarily utilized as the "backbone" for advanced chips and semiconductors. The architecture's adoption has recently gained immense traction in Chinese markets, especially after the debut of Huawei's Kirin 9000S SoC, which is said to have been fundamental for achieving such performance. However, the US has realized that "technology transfer" has been rapid to Chinese industry, so lawmakers are now proceeding towards hindering RISC-V developments.
Related Story Samsung To Build Next-Gen Tenstorrent AI Chiplet Leveraging RISC-V Architecture
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.
-Representative Michael McCaul via Reuters
The two main lawmakers involved in the process include the likes of Senators Marco Rubio and Mark Warner, who are fearful of a potential "Chinese tech revival", especially showing concern with Chinese in-house advancement with RISC-V technology. The dominance of Chinese representatives at the "RISC-V International Foundation" is a prime example of what the US is concerned with since companies like Huawei, ZTE, and Alibaba are at the forefront regarding adopting RISC-V architecture in their homegrown designs.
Huawei Kirin 9000S
A teardown was performed on the newly launched Huawei Mate 60 Pro 5G, revealing the new Kirin 9000S chipset / Image Credits - Bloomberg
While the US hasn't implemented official measures yet, it will undoubtedly have an adverse effect on the global industry. Looking at the "prolonged" history of tech sanctions implemented by the US on China, it has been clear that affected nations have found a way to actually "bypass" them, either through in-house solutions or sourcing through third-party facilitators. Reports from Russian media will back my statement here since it is being disclosed that Russia plans on building a supercomputer based on NVIDIA's H100 AI GPUs, which "officially" aren't accessible by the nation.
US-China trade policies have had a significant impact on tech firms, especially those that have a broader consumer base in China, such as NVIDIA and Intel. While the US has compensated such business through policies such as the "CHIPS Act", it still doesn't have a "profound" impact, which is why US lawmakers are being forced to amend their policies.
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Reuters: RISC-V technology emerges as battleground in US-China tech war
+ Spoiler: RISC-V technology emerges as battleground in US-China tech warOct 6 (Reuters) - In a new front in the U.S.-China tech war, President Joe Biden's administration is facing pressure from some lawmakers to restrict American companies from working on a freely available chip technology widely used in China - a move that could upend how the global technology industry collaborates across borders.
At issue is RISC-V, pronounced "risk five," an open-source technology that competes with costly proprietary technology from British semiconductor and software design company Arm Holdings (O9Ty.F). RISC-V can be used as a key ingredient for anything from a smartphone chip to advanced processors for artificial intelligence.
Some lawmakers - including two Republican House of Representatives committee chairmen, Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Democratic Senator Mark Warner - are urging Biden's administration to take action regarding RISC-V, citing national security grounds.
The lawmakers expressed concerns that Beijing is exploiting a culture of open collaboration among American companies to advance its own semiconductor industry, which could erode the current U.S. lead in the chip field and help China modernize its military. Their comments represent the first major effort to put constraints on work by U.S. companies on RISC-V.
Representative Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House select committee on China, said in a statement to Reuters that the Commerce Department needs to "require 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."
Such calls to regulate RISC-V are the latest in the U.S.-China battle over chip technology that escalated last year with sweeping export restrictions that the Biden administration has told China it will update this month.
"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," Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement to Reuters.
McCaul said he wants action from the Bureau of Industry and Security, the part of the Commerce Department that oversees export-control regulations, and would pursue legislation if that does not materialize.
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," a Commerce Department spokesperson said in a statement.
"Communist China is developing open-source chip architecture to dodge our sanctions and grow its chip industry," Rubio said in a statement to Reuters. "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."
"I fear that our export-control laws are not equipped to deal with the challenge of open-source software - whether in advanced semiconductor designs like RISC-V or in the area of AI - and a dramatic paradigm shift is needed," Warner said in a statement to Reuters.
RISC-V is overseen by a Swiss-based nonprofit foundation that coordinates efforts among for-profit companies to develop the technology.
The RISC-V technology came from labs at the University of California, Berkeley, and later benefited from funding by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its creators have compared it to Ethernet, USB and even the internet, which are freely available and draw on contributions from around the world to make innovation faster and cheaper.
HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES
Executives from China's Huawei Technologies have embraced RISC-V as a pillar of that nation's progress in developing its own chips. But the United States and its allies also have jumped on the technology, with chip giant Qualcomm (QCOM.O) working with a group of European automotive firms on RISC-V chips and Alphabet's Google saying it will make Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system, work on RISC-V chips.
Qualcomm declined to comment. Its executives said in August they believe RISC-V will speed up chip innovation and transform the tech industry.
Google did not respond to a request for comment.
If Biden's administration were to regulate U.S. companies' participation in the Swiss-based foundation in the manner lawmakers are seeking, the move could complicate how American and Chinese companies work together on open technical standards. It also could create hurdles for China's pursuit of chip self-sufficiency, as well as for U.S. and European efforts to create cheaper and more versatile chips.
Jack Kang, vice president of business development at SiFive, a Santa Clara, California-based startup using RISC-V, said potential U.S. government restrictions on American companies regarding RISC-V would be a "tremendous tragedy."
"It would be like banning us from working on the internet," Kang said. "It would be a huge mistake in terms of technology, leadership, innovation and companies and jobs that are being created."
Regulating the open discussion of technologies is rarer than regulating physical products, but not impossible, said Kevin Wolf, an export-control attorney at law firm Akin Gump who served in the Commerce Department under former President Barack Obama. Existing rules on chip exports could help provide a legal framework for such a proposal, Wolf said.
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