Amid intensifying tech war, 1 US chip design firm sees opportunity in China

US semiconductor intellectual property (IP) provider SiFive is promoting its processor cores to chip designers in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen this week, tapping into China’s enthusiasm for the open-source RISC-V architecture.

As Washington restricts exports of advanced chip technology to its geopolitical rival, China is putting its hopes on RISC-V, an open-standard instruction set architecture (ISA) that gives chip developers the ability to configure and customise their designs, giving China more room to manoeuvre.

Arm often charges high licensing and royalty fees and gives customers little freedom to design their own chips, according to Krste Asanovic, a founding father of RISC-V and co-founder of SiFive.

Asonovic received a rock-star reception at the SiFive RISC-V China Technology Forum in Beijing on Wednesday, with a packed room of engineers and researchers waiting in line to take photos with him. Jack Kang, SiFive’s vice-president of business development, said at the event that the company has decided to expand its team and investment in China to tap “huge opportunities in the Chinese market”.

Kang said the country’s huge demand for semiconductors in artificial intelligence (AI) and electric vehicle applications will generate huge demand for its chip cores.

The San Mateo, California-based firm, founded in 2015, was the world’s first company to produce a chip with the RISC-V architecture, and is now a key supplier of commercial RISC-V processor intellectual property cores. China has been keen to adopt RISC-V amid its self-sufficiency drive in semiconductor technologies, with prominent chip experts throwing their weight behind the open-standard ISA.

SiFive is free to export its commercial IP cores to mainland Chinese clients, except to those on the US trade blacklist known as the Entity List, Kang said.