Washington is planning new measures to damage China’s chip industry. The arrows now focus on the open standard RISC-V.

The USA is doing everything it can to deny Chinese companies access to modern chip technology and does not want to leave any loophole open. Senators Marco Rubio (Rep.) and Mark Warner (Dem.) are calling on President Biden to regulate RISC-V. “The Chinese Communist Party is abusing RISC-V to circumvent U.S. dominance over the intellectual property needed to develop chips,” a spokesman said in a statement to Reuters.

RISC-V is an open architecture for developing chips ranging from smartphone processors to high-performance AI chips. The standard provides a loophole for companies not on Arm, Intel and other chip majors’ customer lists to continue to compete in the chip industry. Huawei uses RISC-V, among others, as does the American Qualcomm.

Closed source

Regulating open source technology sounds contradictory because the philosophy of open source is that everyone should have equal access to technology. But from a legal perspective it is not impossible. The senators argue that export licenses that currently apply to patented technology should be extended to RISC-V. American companies would then have to apply for a license to work with Chinese colleagues via the platform.

It should come as no surprise that Washington has its sights set on RISC-V. Chinese chips may be several years behind in technical performance, but the industry is proving resilient, and the United States doesn’t like that. Restricting RISC-V would make it much more difficult for Chinese companies to catch up.

World Wide Web

But American chipmakers that use RISC-V aren’t very interested in it either. A California startup compares restrictions on the chip standard to restrictions on the World Wide Web: “It would be a huge mistake in terms of technology, leadership, innovation and companies and jobs created.”