In a new front in the U.S.-China tech war, President Joe Biden's administration is facing pressure from some members of Congress to restrict U.S. companies from developing a free chip technology widely used in China - a move that could upend the way the global tech industry collaborates across borders. The open source technology competes with costly proprietary technology from British semiconductor and software design company Arm Holdings (O9Ty.F). From smartphone chips to advanced processors for artificial intelligence, RISC-V can serve as a key element.
Some lawmakers, including two Republican House committee chairs, Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Democratic Senator Mark Warner, are urging the Biden administration to take action on RISC-V, citing national security concerns.
The two lawmakers worry that the Chinese government is exploiting the culture of open cooperation among U.S. companies to promote its own semiconductor industry, which could undermine the United States' current leadership in the chip field and help China modernize its military. Their comments represent the first major effort to impose restrictions on U.S. companies' work on RISC-V.
Rep. Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House Select Committee on China, said in a statement to Reuters that the Commerce Department needs to "require any U.S. person or company to obtain an export license before engaging in RISC-V technology cooperation with entities in the People's Republic of China (PRC)."
The call for regulation of RISC-V is the latest development in the chip technology battle between China and the United States. Last year, the Biden administration told China that it would update sweeping export restrictions this month.
"The Chinese Communist Party is abusing RISC-V to circumvent U.S. dominance in the intellectual property required for chip design." Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement to Reuters: "Americans should not support China's technology transfer strategy because such a strategy weakens U.S. export control laws."
McCaul said he hopes the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, which oversees export control regulations, will take action and if that doesn't happen, he will pursue legislative avenues.
A Commerce Department spokesman said in a statement that the Bureau of Industry and Security "is continually reviewing the technology landscape and threat environment and continually evaluating how our export control policies can best be applied to protect national security and core technologies."
Congressman Rubio said in a statement to Reuters: "Communist China is developing open source chip architecture to evade our sanctions and grow its chip industry. If we do not expand export controls to include this threat, China will one day surpass us and become the global leader in chip design."
"I am concerned that our export control laws are not equipped to meet the challenges of open source software - whether in advanced semiconductor design like RISC-V or in artificial intelligence - that require a dramatic paradigm shift," Congressman Warner said in a statement to Reuters.
RISC-V is overseen by a Swiss-based nonprofit foundation that coordinates the efforts of various for-profit companies to develop the technology.
RISC-V technology came from a lab at the University of California, Berkeley, and was later funded by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The technology's creators compare it to Ethernet, USB and even the Internet in that these technologies are available for free and leverage contributions from around the world to make innovation faster and cheaper.
Executives at China's Huawei Technologies see RISC-V as a pillar of the country's progress in developing its own chips. Chip giant Qualcomm (QCOM.O) is working with a group of European car companies to develop RISC-V chips, while Alphabet's Google said it will run Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system, on RISC-V chips.
Qualcomm declined to comment. Qualcomm executives said in August that they believed RISC-V would accelerate chip innovation and transform the technology industry. Google also did not respond to a request for comment.
If the Biden administration regulates U.S. companies' participation in Swiss foundations in the way lawmakers seek, the move could complicate cooperation between U.S. and Chinese companies on open technology standards. The move could also pose an obstacle to China's efforts to pursue self-sufficiency in chips, as well as efforts in the United States and Europe to create cheaper, more versatile chips.
Jack Kang, vice president of business development at SiFive, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup that uses RISC-V, said the U.S. government may restrict the use of RISC-V in China.
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