An anonymous reader shared this Reuters report:
On a new front in the U.S.-China tech war, President Joe Biden’s administration faces pressure from some lawmakers to block U.S. companies from working on freely available chip technology and widely used in China – a move that could upend the way the global tech industry collaborates. across borders…
RISC-V can be used as a key ingredient for everything from a smartphone chip to advanced processors for artificial intelligence… Lawmakers have expressed concern that Beijing is exploiting a culture of open collaboration between U.S. companies to advance its own semiconductor industry, which could erode the United States’ current lead in chips and help China modernize its military. Their comments represent the first major effort to impose constraints on U.S. companies’ work on RISC-V…
Executives at China’s Huawei Technologies have embraced RISC-V as a pillar of that country’s progress in developing its own chips. But the United States and its allies have also jumped on the technology, with chip giant Qualcomm working with a group of European auto companies on RISC-V chips and Alphabet’s Google saying it will enable Android, the system the most popular mobile operating system in the world, running on RISC-V chips…
Jack Kang, vice president of business development at SiFive, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup using RISC-V, said potential U.S. government restrictions on U.S. companies regarding RISC-V would be a “huge tragedy.” . “That would mean banning us from working on the Internet,” Kang said. “That would be a huge mistake in terms of technology, leadership, innovation and the businesses and jobs that are created.”
A U.S. official said the Chinese Communist Party was “abusing RISC-V to circumvent U.S. dominance over intellectual property needed for chip design.”
“Americans should not support a PRC technology transfer strategy that serves to undermine U.S. export control laws.”
