Beijing betting on new semiconductor design to escape shackles of US bans

China is betting on an open-source chip design architecture to help the country achieve selfsufficiency in semiconductors, as the United States tightens its restrictions over the export of advanced chip technologies and equipment to Chinese entities.

At an industry event earlier this week, 11 Chinese semiconductor companies unveiled their latest chips based on the so-called RISC-V architecture, a sign of China’s efforts to move away from popular chip design standards controlled by Western companies.

The new RISC-V chips “represent China’s advanced level of integrated circuit designs”, according to the China RISC-V Industry Consortium – a group made up of local RISC-V start-ups and Shanghai-based integrated circuit design contractor VeriSilicon Holdings.

RISC-V, the fifth generation of reduced instruction set computers created in 2010 by the University of California, Berkeley, is open-source, meaning the source code is publicly available for free.

On the other hand, X86 – the dominant chip design architecture for desktop and laptop computers – is developed by US tech giant Intel, while the design architecture behind most smartphone chips in the world is controlled by British firm Arm.

As China moves to reduce its dependence on foreign technologies, Shanghai became the first in the country to kick-start the development of RISC-V. In July 2018, as part of a larger package to boost its chip industry, the city introduced specific financial incentives to encourage companies to develop RISC-V processors and related intellectual property cores.

The new chips unveiled on Wednesday cover a wide range of applications ranging from personal computers (PCs) and cars to wireless communications and energy management, with some companies claiming they had achieved significant technological breakthroughs.

StarFive, founded in Shanghai in 2018 under a partnership with world-leading RISC-V company SiFive, said its new RISC-V central

processing unit was designed to “directly benchmark” against Arm’s Cortex-A76, launched in 2018. The company said its new product was made with 12-nanometre process nodes and aimed to become the world’s first RISC-V chip compatible with “mainstream notebook and mini-PC applications”.

Artosyn, founded in Shanghai in 2011, described its latest communication chip, AR8030, as the world’s first 150M-7GHz fullband wireless system-on-a-chip. It is based on an RISC-V central processing unit core developed by T-Head, Alibaba Group Holding’s in-house semiconductor unit. Alibaba is the owner of the Post.

Timesintelli Technology, another Shanghai-based chip design company, said some of its RISC-V processors could compete with Arm’s Cortex M and Cortex R.

Many of these chips are expected to enter the market next year, according to company executives. Going from the research and development stage to mass production and shipment will mark an important milestone, according to Wayne Dai, founder and chairman of VeriSilicon.

Most of the 10 RISC-V chips introduced in last year’s forum had already reached mass production, with cumulative shipments surpassing 10 million units, Dai said.