China Aims To Deliver Open Source Chip This Year

Matthew Broersma,
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Workers in a semiconductor plant. Image credit: Intel

Head of Chinese government research academy promises high-performance chip based on open source RISC-V standard, amidst chip tensions

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The head of a prestigious government research centre in China has said the group should be able to deliver a high-performance open source processing unit this year, as the country looks to reduce its dependence on imported chips amidst political tensions with the US.

Bao Yungang, deputy director at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ (CAS) Institute of Computing Technology, said in a Weibo post that the academy should be able to deliver its XiangShan CPU this year.

The CAS initiated the XiangShan project in 2019, as the US began to implement export sanctions on Huawei Technologies and other Chinese tech firms.

An photograph of a Chinese flag. Keywords: China, hacking, security

Open source design

The project aims to deliver high-performance processors based on the RISC-V open source semiconductor specification, which was initiated in 2010 at the University of California at Berkeley and is currently governed by RISC-V International, a Swiss non-profit entity.

China has begun focusing on RISC-V as an alternative to proprietary chip architectures such as x86, dominated by Intel and AMD, and the increasingly widespread platforms from UK-based ARM.

The central government and dozens of Chinese state entities and research institutes invested at least $50 million (£40m) in projects involving RISC-V between 2019 and 2023, Reuters reported last February.

The resulting chips are able to power self-driving cars, AI models and data centres, the report said, citing unnamed people.

Half of the more than 10 billion RISC-V chips shipped wordlwide in 2022 were made in China, state-run newspaper China Daily reported that year.

Bao told a chip conference in June 2023 that funding for RISC-V start-ups in China had reached at least $1.18bn to that point.

Alternative system

The CAS Institute of Computing Technology, which is under US sanctions, in May 2023 unveiled the second generation of XiangShan, aimed to create high-performance chips based on RISC-V, as well as Aolai, a RISC-V operating system.

So far RISC-V chips are far less widely used than x86 and ARM architectures, with the SHD Group estimating that 1.9 percent of all system-on-a-chip units shipped with RISC-V processors in 2022.

SoCs are widely used in systems that need to combine power-efficiency with high performance, including mobile platforms, such as smartphones and tablets, as well as edge computing systems.

China is engaged in an intensifying trade war with the US in which the US is trying to cut off Chinese companies’ access to advanced technologies such as high-end chips and chipmaking equipment, arguing such technologies threaten its national security, which China denies.