A Chinese flag is displayed next to a"Made in China" sign seen on a printed circuit board with semiconductor chips, in this illustration picture taken February 17, 2023.
The lawmakers expressed concerns that Beijing is exploiting a culture of open collaboration among American companies to advance its own semiconductor industry, which could erode the current US lead in the chip field and help China modernise its military. Their comments represent the first major effort to put constraints on work by US companies on RISC-V.
“The CCP is abusing RISC-V to get around US dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips. US persons should not be supporting a PRC tech transfer strategy that serves to degrade US export control laws,” Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement to Reuters.
“Communist China is developing open-source chip architecture to dodge our sanctions and grow its chip industry,” Rubio said in a statement to Reuters. “If we don’t broaden our export controls to include this threat, China will one day surpass us as the global leader in chip design.” The RISC-V technology came from labs at the University of California, Berkeley, and later benefited from funding by the Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency . Its creators have compared it to Ethernet, USB and even the internet, which are freely available and draw on contributions from around the world to make innovation faster and cheaper.Executives from China’s Huawei Technologies have embraced RISC-V as a pillar of that nation’s progress in developing its own chips.