China to publish policy to boost RISC-V chip use nationwide - sources

[Daniel Nenni]

FILE PHOTO: Illustration picture of semiconductor chips and Chinese flag

BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China plans to issue guidance to encourage the use of open-source RISC-V chips nationwide for the first time, two sources briefed on the matter said, as Beijing accelerates efforts to curb the country's dependence on Western-owned technology.

The policy guidance on boosting the use of RISC-V chips could be released as soon as this month, although the final date could change, the sources said.

It is being drafted jointly by eight government bodies, including the Cyberspace Administration of China, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the China National Intellectual Property Administration, they added.

The sources declined to be named as the policy discussions were still under way. The four ministries did not respond to requests for comment.

RISC-V is a open-source technology that is used to design a range of less-sophisticated chips, from those in smartphones to CPUs for artificial intelligence servers.
It competes globally with proprietary and more commonly used chip architecture technology including x86, dominated by U.S. firms Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, and Arm, developed by SoftBank Group-owned Arm Holdings.

In China, state entities and research institutes have eagerly embraced RISC-V in recent years, seeing it as geopolitically neutral. Chinese chip designers are attracted by its lower costs, but the government has yet to mention it in policy.

Its widening use in the country has been greeted warily in the United States, as friction between Washington and Beijing grow - especially over technology.

In 2023, Reuters reported that some U.S. lawmakers were putting pressure on the Biden administration to restrict American companies from working on the technology over concerns that Beijing was exploiting its open-source nature to advance its own semiconductor industry.

China's largest for-profit RISC-V intellectual property providers include Alibaba's XuanTie and startup Nuclei System Technology, which sell commercial RISC-V processors to chip designers.

Industry executives at a event focused on RISC-V that was organised by XuanTie last week said the popularity of DeepSeek could also boost adoption of RISC-V, as the Chinese AI startup's models run efficiently on less-powerful chips.

Smaller companies that want to use AI and DeepSeek could turn to chips designed with RISC-V's architecture, said Sun Haitao, a manager at China Mobile System Integration, an ICT equipment provider during the event.

"Even if a RISC-V solution priced at 10 million yuan might only reach about 30% of the level of NVIDIA or Huawei, buying three sets means the overall cost might still be lower," he said. "I think this is a breakthrough point."

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/exclusive-china-publish-policy-boost-035222756.html

 

[cliff]

Altera just stole one of my RISC-V developers (we are making the Prickley Pear Pi) to put in their FPGAs. RISC-V is hot.

 

[siliconbruh999]

RISC-V is the future imo

 

[blueone]

I knew this would happen WRT China, from the first time I was introduced to RISC-V in a meeting at UC Berkeley. When I read that the RISC-V Foundation moved its home base to Switzerland, it was obvious they were targeting China. The original RISC-V program at Berkeley received DARPA funding, so it's always been seen as vulnerable, but nothing I'm aware of has come of it. A collection of Chinese companies have formed a patent alliance, though it appears the alliance is aimed at avoiding problems with Chinese courts, because the RISC-V Foundation's contribution and patent licensing requirements dictate that patents which cover specification contributions are required to be licensed freely (think BSD license). I've sometimes wondered if the Chinese courts would recognize international licenses as they relate to Chinese patents, but I'm not an IP specialist by any means.

I think RISC-V has survived potential restrictions from the USG, because most of the USG's advisors appear to be academics, and they have a vested interest in open everything (except when universities patent their inventions). The future of RISC-V could be very interesting to watch.

 

[cliff]

I think you are spot on. There are a lot of open source RISC-V cores, but they require VCS licenses to deal with the parameters in the RTL. The opentitan and openhardware group prefers using commercial licenses (I find this appalling), and China probably steals the VCS licenses, so they don't care. Because we compete with Synopsy and Cadence, and we are in the US, we had to create our own from scratch with help from a lot of very available MSEE graduates. We assume that there is no profit to be made on the RISC-V cores and peripherals, but we gotta have it, so we are putting out our RISC-V CPU (with vector extensions, etc) and logic libraries for free for our tool users.

I originally didn't take the CPU seriously. It was just a cool circuit to test our digital tool flow (we started out analog), but my team of MSEEs took it seriously and with the ecosystem is growing rapidly. We are now betting that RISC-V will dominate the ASIC market soon. If we lose RISC-V developers, we replace them quickly. The MSEEs want to work on RISC-V.

 

[blueone]

The MSEEs want to work on RISC-V.

That's insightful.

I always thought that RISC-V would dominate the ASIC market, but it's taking a lot longer than I thought it would. Arm's ecosystem must be stickier than I anticipated.

 

[cliff]

Actually, you predicted ARM would be sticky about 2 years ago. You were right. Times are changing rapidly though.. based on your previous comment.