How China is Building an Open National Chip Plan Around RISC-V

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It is becoming clearer that China's plan to cut reliance on Western chip technology revolves around homegrown chips built using the open RISC-V architecture, which is also gaining popularity in the Europe and U.S.

www.hpcwire.com/, Jul. 19, 2023 – 

China has for years has talked about moving its chip strategy in the direction of RISC-V, which is a free-to-license API blueprint to build chips, but no serious action was taken. 

Previous efforts to make sovereign chips around alternative architectures went nowhere. But this year the China government has finally shown seriousness about funding RISC-V initiatives. 

The Chinese government's sudden interest in RISC-V came overnight, and that was a surprise to academic Yungang Bao, who is the deputy director of information and communications technologies at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

"This year, the Ministry of Science and Technology and the National Science Foundation China are already inviting proposals for RISC-V related research. This is quite a substantial change," Yungang said during a presentation at the RISC-V Summit held last month in Barcelona.

In 2012, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology proposed to merge all kinds of chip architecture blueprints being used in the country into a unified design. Those architectures included x86, MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha, and SPARC.

But it became difficult to reach a consensus on how to merge these instruction-set architectures, Yungang said. 

"RISC-V provides an excellent answer," Yungang said.

RISC-V, which is free and open-source, provides a faster and cheaper alternative to design and manufacture chips without relying on Western technologies. 

"Over the past years most RISC-V related work was done, kind of, bottom-up. Today the Minister of Science and Technology is ... already paying attention to RISC-V. More universities use RISC-V for teaching, for example. There is already ... a textbook based on RISC-V now," Yungang said.

In some areas, the U.S. has restricted semiconductors in trade and policy and tightened certain Western AI chip and CPU exports to Chinese organizations. That has forced China to look internally for technologies to develop chips, and RISC-V is emerging as a top option. 

RISC-V research and development started in 2015 mostly at the academic and startup levels but is now rapidly maturing. RISC-V is considered an open technology, much like Linux. The base architecture can be licensed for free and then can be modified by Chinese companies to meet their needs.  The most common commercial alternatives are either to use the widespread x86 architecture, that can only be purchased in manufactured form, or to purchase a licensed design for ARM architectures.

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