China bets on open-source chips as US export controls mount - Reuters
BEIJING (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 and Advanced Micro Devices, and Arm, developed by Britain’s Arm Holdings, owned by SoftBank Group.
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.
