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.
"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.