Continued pressure by US lawmakers to restrict China's access to RISC-V has been called into question.
Ahead of the annual RISC-V Summit in Silicon Valley's Santa Clara, taking place this week, Andrew 'bunnie' Huang - a noted hardware hacker, electronics biz owner, and author - said attempts by politicians to somehow stop China from using RISC-V was destined to backfire on American companies. He urged the Biden administration to instead take action to promote rather than stifle innovation in that part of the chip sector.
Huang's warning, made in an
open letter on his blog and sent to the White House, US Dept of Commerce, and members of Congress came in response to a group of bipartisan lawmakers calling on the White House to address, in their minds', the national security risks posed by the People's Republic of China (PRC) using RISC-V. These lawmakers are unhappy that China is getting its hands so easily on what they see as American-controlled technology.
Developed in 2010 by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, in the US, RISC-V has risen to prominence thanks, in no small part, to its open nature. It's a royalty-free instruction set architecture (ISA) that
specifies a base set of CPU instructions, with various optional extensions available to extend its functionality.
Chip designers around the world, from the USA and Europe to India, China, and Japan, are free to create processors and other components that are compatible with it, and have done so and are expected to keep doing so. A good deal of RISC-V designs and software are open source, though that openness is not required: you can make a RISC-V-compatible processor yourself, using the open ISA, and keep the blueprints private, if you so wished.
RISC-V International is the Swiss organization that steers development of the ISA, and it does not design CPU cores. The body even
relocated its address to Switzerland from the US in 2019 in an attempt to avoid America and others from restricting access to the project.
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