The United States Department of Commerce is reportedly considering lawmakers' calls to make it harder for China to use the RISC-V instruction set arch

US government reportedly ponders crimping China's use of RISC-V

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2024-04-24 04:00:02

The United States Department of Commerce is reportedly considering lawmakers' calls to make it harder for China to use the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA).

RISC-V is permissively licensed – developers can access the ISA for free and use it to create proprietary or open source implementations for commercial or other applications as they see fit.

In late 2023, members of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) expressed concern that the Uncle Sam's many efforts to make it hard for advanced chips to reach China are being undermined by RISC-V.

"While the benefits of open source collaboration on RISC-V promise to be significant, it can only be realized when contributors are working with the sole aim of improving the technology, and not aiding the geopolitical interests of the PRC," the representatives wrote in a November 2023 letter that called for creation of a "robust ecosystem for open source collaboration among the US and our allies while ensuring the PRC is unable to benefit from that work."

That's code for "Banning sales of chips to China won't work if Beijing can build its own using RISC-V." The Committee members therefore called on US commerce secretary Gina Raimondo to consider what might be done about RISC-V.