Reuters news report claimsOn the grounds of national security, U.S. lawmakers asked the Biden administration to take action against the recently developedRISC-V architecture technologyApplications should be controlled to avoid affecting the status of the U.S. semiconductor industry.
Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Democratic Senator Mark Warner, among others, believe that an increasing number of Chinese companies are using the open-source RISC-V architecture technology to build processor products. This provides additional development opportunities as instruction sets and architecture technologies such as Arm are included in export restrictions by the US government, which is bound to affect the US's leading position in semiconductor chips.
Mike Gallagher, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on China, believes that the U.S. Department of Commerce should require any U.S. individual or company to obtain a technology export license before conducting RISC-V architecture technology-related trade with Chinese entities.
Mike Gallagher said that Chinese companies are using the RISC-V architecture to circumvent U.S. export restrictions on chip-related design technologies. This may affect the United States' past leading position in semiconductor chips. Therefore, he hopes that the U.S. Department of Commerce will take relevant action. Otherwise, it will strengthen export restrictions on RISC-V architecture technology through legislation.
Like the Arm architecture, the RISC-V architecture operates as a reduced instruction set (RISC-V) architecture, but it is open source, unlike the Arm architecture, which is licensed. Currently, it has been adopted by companies such as IBM, NXP, Western Digital, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, Google, Huawei, and Tesla. Many companies are even worried about future increases in licensing fees or changes in the licensing model for the Arm architecture, so they are incorporating RISC-V architecture technology to enable them to adapt their development models at any time.
However, many market opinions believe that if the Biden administration begins to impose export restrictions on RISC-V architecture technology, it may affect Chinese companies using this architecture technology to create independently designed chips, but it will also affect American companies' participation in the development of RISC-V architecture technology, and even hinder the United States and Europe from manufacturing cheaper and more functional chip products.
