China is seeing a chance to improve its self sufficiency in microprocessors, the heart of every smart device, through the open-standard RISC-V chip design architecture, according to an executive at one of the country's first RISC-V firms.
When Nuclei System Technology was formed in the summer of 2018, the open standard was still a novel concept in the country. However, it quickly grew into a vibrant community, with the China RISC-V Industry Alliance - an association promoting the standard locally - reporting 140 members as of December 2021.
Hopes were high that RISC-V would enable China to crack the market for central processing unit (CPU) designs, breaking the monopoly held by US and British firms, and in turn help the country achieve its strategic goal of self-sufficiency in chips.
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Intel's X86 is the dominant CPU standard for laptops and computers, while the instruction set architecture (ISA) from Arm, owned by Japan's Softbank, is widely used in smartphones. For Chinese firms like Nuclei, which was founded by engineer Bob Hu Zhenbo, RISC-V provides an opportunity to catch up.
"Bob sees an opportunity with RISC-V that would give China a chance to advance the development of its own CPUs," Nathan Ma, a senior strategy director at Nuclei, told the South China Morning Post.
RISC-V came out of the University of California at Berkeley in 2010, and gained global popularity after its specifications were made available to all developers in 2015 under the RISC-V Foundation. Arizona-based Research firm Semico estimated that the number of chips that include at least some RISC-V technology will grow at an annual rate of 73.6 per cent per annum through 2027.
China's embrace of open standards like RISC-V comes as Beijing is increasingly worried about supply chain risks after seeing the group boycott of Russia by Western tech companies over Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.
Shanghai was the first to kick start RISC-V development, announcing financial incentives in July 2018 to encourage companies to develop RISC-V processors and IP cores as part of the city's larger incentive package for its chip industry.
Nuclei's Ma said open instructions were like a list of rules, but they still require experience and expertise from engineers like Hu to apply the rules to develop IP cores.
Hu, a confessed "CPU guy", pioneered the field in China before geopolitical tensions worsened between Beijing and Washington. He is author of Hands-on CPU Design: RISC-V processors, one of the first Chinese language book on the technology, and Hu stuck with CPU core development after many of his peers pivoted to other ventures due to the lack of job opportunities from Western tech firms in China.