Tech war: China’s use of RISC-V chip standard faces headwinds amid US scrutiny and Google’s end of Android support
China’s strengthened push to use RISC-V, an open-source chip-design architecture, to reduce reliance on foreign technologies is facing new challenges amid scrutiny by the United States and Google’s move to stop supporting the standard on Android.
As its tech war with the US escalates, China has been investing heavily on RISC-V as an alternative to the ecosystems of British semiconductor design giant Arm and US firm Intel for designing specialised chips used in artificial intelligence (AI) and mobile devices.
However, there are growing signs that Washington is moving to curb China’s use of RISC-V. The US commerce department said last month it was reviewing the national security implications of China’s use of the technology, five months after a group of bipartisan lawmakers urged the Biden administration to prevent China from dominating use of the chip design standard.
Meanwhile, Google last week removed RISC-V support from the Android kernel, which is the computer program at the core of the operating system.
The move will slow down the plans of RISC-V chip vendors targeting Android systems and devices, according to William Li, analyst at research firm Counterpoint.
Although developers can still restore RISC-V support by themselves, that will “take more work than would otherwise be necessary”, said Stewart Randall, head of electronics and embedded software at consultancy Intralink.
The global impact is likely to be limited because “most companies designing chips around RISC-V are not designing chips for Android devices”, said Randall. But in China, there are at least 300 companies using RISC-V, with almost all major tech players backing the standard.
Of the 25 premier members at RISC-V International, the non-profit group aimed at promoting the technology, over half are from China. They include Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Technologies, ZTE, and the state-sponsored Beijing Institute of Open Source Chip.
Other premier members include Google, Intel and Qualcomm.
Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post, as well as Huawei and Tencent Holdings are all developing chips based on RISC-V. Damo Academy, a research arm of Alibaba, is expanding its XuanTie series of processors based on the architecture. The processors have been used in 5G communications, robotics and financial services, according to Damo.
Baidu-backed chip maker StarFive Technology is also working on RISC-V-based central processing units, with plans to launch a semiconductor research-and-development lab to design a RISC-V chip in Hong Kong.
Despite growing worries in the US, China’s contribution to RISC-V remains strong, Zhang Xiaorong, director of the Beijing-based Cutting-Edge Technology Research Institute, was quoted as saying in a recent Global Times report.
Companies already working on RISC-V support in Android are also unlikely to end their projects, “though there’s quite a bit of work still ahead”, said Counterpoint’s Li.
