The administration of President Joe Biden is under pressure from a number of lawmakers to impose restrictions on American businesses from developing widely used, openly accessible chip technology in China, starting a new battleground in the US-China technology war that would fundamentally change how the global technology sector cooperates.
The issue is with RISC-V, pronounced "risk five," a publicly available technology that competes with expensive proprietary technology developed by the British semiconductor design giant Arm Holdings. Anything ranging from a smartphone chip to cutting-edge AI processors can benefit from the use of RISC-V as a fundamental component.
Some lawmakers are pressing the administration of Biden to take measures on RISC-V out of consideration of national security. They voiced worry that China is utilizing a climate of open cooperation among American companies to improve its own semiconductor business, which may weaken the US advantage in the world chip industry and help China modernize its armed forces. This is the first significant attempt to impose restrictions on RISC-V development made by American companies.
These proposals calling for RISC-V restrictions are the latest news in the US-China conflict on chip technology, which intensified last year with wide export limits that the administration of Joe Biden has promised to amend this month.
By abusing RISC-V, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is able to evade the American ruling on the intellectual property needed for chip design. Representative Michael McCaul, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that Americans shouldn't be supporting a Chinese technology transfer policy that will weaken US export control regulations. He added that if the Bureau of Industry and Security does not take any measures, he will take legislative action.
A representative for the Commerce Department noted in a statement that the bureau is continuously analyzing how to appropriately apply their export control regulations in order to defend vital technologies and safeguard national security while also taking into account the threat conditions and technological landscape.
According to a statement from Republican Senator Marco Rubio, China is creating open-source chips to avoid sanctions and promote its chip industry, and it will someday overtake America as the world's top chip designer if America's export restrictions are not expanded to tackle this threat.
Democratic Senator Mark Warner said that in the case of cutting-edge semiconductor technologies like RISC-V or in the field of artificial intelligence, he worries that their export-control regulations are ill-prepared to handle the challenge of free software, and a major change in paradigm is needed.
HUAWEI Technologies
Chinese Huawei Technologies executives see RISC-V as a cornerstone of their country's advancement in chip development. However, the US and its allies have also seized on the technology. For example, chipmaker Qualcomm is working on RISC-V chips with a team of European automotive companies, and Alphabet's Google has announced that it plans to make Android, the operating system used by the majority of mobile devices in the world, compatible with RISC-V chips.
Qualcomm refused to comment. In August, the company's management expressed their optimism that RISC-V would accelerate chip innovation and fundamentally alter the computer sector.
The proposal might make it more difficult for American and Chinese businesses to collaborate on open technical guidelines if the administration of Biden were to limit US corporations' involvement in the Swiss-based organization in the way that lawmakers are asking for. It might also pose obstacles to China's quest for semiconductor self-sufficiency and to European and American efforts to develop less expensive, more adaptable chips.
Potential US government restrictions on American businesses using RISC-V would be a great tragedy, according to Jack Kang, the vice president of business development from SiFive, a California-based startup that uses RISC-V.
Kang said that it would be something like prohibiting people from using the internet for work, and it could be a serious mistake in respect to leadership, innovation, and the development of new businesses and jobs.
According to Kevin Wolf, an export-control lawyer with the law firm Akin Gump who previously worked in the Commerce Department under former President Barack Obama, regulating the open discussion of technologies is more uncommon than regulating tangible things, but it is not impossible. A legal framework for such a proposal might be provided by existing laws on chip exports.