China all in on RISC-V open-source chip design
It's 'RISC on' in China.
The Chinese government plans to promote the nationwide use of open-source RISC-V integrated circuit (IC) design standards under new guidelines that may be announced in the next few weeks, Reuters reported.
China's Cyberspace Administration, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Ministry of Science and Technology and National Intellectual Property Administration are all reportedly involved, according to the Reuters report.
If so, it would give a big push forward to a trend that has been gathering pace for several years now and a big pushback against the US government, which, under presidents Trump 1.0, Biden and Trump 2.0, has consistently sought to police the global semiconductor industry and stifle its development in China.
Hong Kong's government is also promoting RISC-V (pronounced 'risk-five') to make a place for itself as one of China's IC design centers. The establishment of a Hong Kong AI Research and Development Institute will complement the policy.
Writing under the headline 'The Role of RISC-V in Shaping the Future' in EE Times, Frankwell Lin, CEO of Taiwan's Andes Technology, noted that:
AI's expanding influence – spanning applications like voice recognition, imaging, and natural language processing – underscores the critical role of advanced semiconductors. RISC-V, with its open architecture and highly programmable architecture, is revolutionizing AI accelerators, enabling them to handle inference-heavy workloads more efficiently than fixed-function counterparts. This flexibility positions RISC-V as a linchpin in the evolution of high-performance computing (HPC), addressing the rapidly evolving demands of AI applications.
Lin also points out that:
RISC-V's momentum extends beyond AI, finding applications in EVs, IoT, and 5G. Its ability to foster innovation through an open architecture not only drives technical breakthroughs but also disrupts traditional business models, making it an essential technology for economic growth and recovery across these sectors.
In January, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) announced that its XiangShan RISC-V processor will be ready this year, with modification to support AI dynamo DeepSeek. Xiangshan is' the world's top-performing open-source processor core,' according to CAS.
The XiangShan project was launched in 2019 to develop a high-performance RISC-V processor 'with a focus on regular updates and improvements to the processor's design, performance, and power efficiency,' in the words of TechRadar. The Beijing Institute of Open Source Chip was created to support the project.
In February, Alibaba announced that it will start shipments of its newest RISC-V processor, a server-grade CPU, to customers this month. Alibaba, which plans to invest more than US$50 billion in AI and cloud computing over the next three years, recently announced a new AI model that it claims outperforms DeepSeek.
RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture based on Reduced Instruction Set Computer design principles. A free, non-proprietary platform for the development of IC processors, it is an ideal way for the Chinese (or anyone else) to develop an alternative to the proprietary semiconductor technologies of America's Arm, Intel, Nvidia and other Western firms that are subject to US government export controls.
The RISC-V concept was conceived at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010. The RISC-V Foundation was established in 2015 to support and manage the technology, with the Institute of Computing Technologies of the Chinese Academy of Sciences as one of its founders.
A China RISC-V Alliance was established in 2018 with the goal of creating a complete open-source computing ecosystem by 2030. Also in 2018, the city of Shanghai introduced financial incentives for RISC-V development and Chinese RISC-V specialist StarFive was founded with the support of SiFive, the technology leader headquartered in Santa Clara.
In 2020, the RISC-V Foundation was incorporated in Switzerland as the RISC-V International Association, moving out of the United States to avoid potential disruption caused by then-president Donald Trump's China trade war policies.
US policymakers and politicians would like to use export controls to limit China's use of the technology, but indications are it is too late for that. China already accounts for about 50% of RISC-V core shipment volumes.
Several Chinese companies are 'premier' members of RISC-V International, including Alibaba Cloud, Huawei, ZTE, Tencent and semiconductor products and services supplier Beijing ESWIN. Andes Technology, Google, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Synopsis and SiFive are also premium members.
The least well-known of the premier member Chinese companies, ESWIN, has R&D centers in Beijing, Shanghai, seven other Chinese cities, South Korea and the UK; manufacturing plants in Xi'an and Chengdu; and sales offices in Qingdao, Shenzhen, nine other Chinese cities, South Korea, Japan and the US.
Altogether, the RISC-V International Association has 24 'premier' members, 166 'strategic' members, and 205 'community' members in Europe, Asia and the Americas, according to the RISC-V website.
The fourth annual RISC-V Summit China was held in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, last August, where more than 100 companies, research institutions and open-source technology communities participated. Ranking with similar events in Europe and North America, it attracted some 3,000 domestic and foreign attendees and about half a million viewers online.
These developments are being followed closely by tech companies, consulting firms and government officials in the US. In December 2023, the Jamestown Foundation, a conservative research and analysis consultancy following national security-related trends from Washington, DC, wrote that:
China's engagement with RISC-V is a testament to its strategic foresight and ambition to reshape the semiconductor industry, challenging long-established norms and power structures. The increasing influence of Chinese entities in the RISC-V International Foundation is a clear indicator of China's intention to steer the direction of RISC-V development.
This shift in control away from the United States is not merely about technological advancement but about altering the global tech order. China sees RISC-V as an opportunity to enhance its self-innovation capabilities, foster self-sufficiency, and navigate the complexities of increasing geopolitical tensions.
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