The U.S. government announced an investigation into possible sanctions against the open-source RISC-V chip initiative, believing that China benefits significantly from it. This move could deal a heavy blow to the initiative. There are dark clouds looming over the RISC-V initiative, which is considered one of the most important projects in the chip world in recent years, due to the ongoing embargo tension between the U.S. and China.
The RISC-V initiative is in jeopardy Offering an open-source approach to mobile chip development, the RISC-V initiative adopts a collaborative approach unlike the company-style ARM architecture. The non-profit initiative is managed from Switzerland. With access to innovations cut off from ARM, China has turned to the RISC-V domain. China, which developed the world’s first RISC-V AI chip, has made rapid progress with giants like Huawei, Tencent, and Alibaba. China, which managed to circumvent the U.S. chip embargo, naturally caught the attention of U.S. officials.
Pressure from legal representatives and Senate members, which has been ongoing for some time, has yielded results, and the U.S. Department of Commerce has launched an investigation into the current RISC-V development and China’s role in it. The government will also consider possible disadvantages.
The escalation of tension to the RISC-V side has begun to threaten the initiative. The removal of default RISC-V support in the Android operating system will impose an additional software burden on designers. Moreover, following a possible RISC-V ban, the U.S. and allied countries involved in the initiative will be forced to withdraw. This could lead to the collapse of the global supply chain.
