US government reportedly ponders crimping China's use of RISC-V

The United States Department of Commerce is reportedly considering lawmakers' calls to make it harder for China to use the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA).

RISC-V is permissively licensed – developers can access the ISA for free and use it to create proprietary or open source implementations for commercial or other applications as they see fit.

That license means anyone, anywhere in the world, can work with RISC-V – including chip designers in China.

In late 2023, members of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) expressed concern that the Uncle Sam's many efforts to make it hard for advanced chips to reach China are being undermined by RISC-V.

"While the benefits of open source collaboration on RISC-V promise to be significant, it can only be realized when contributors are working with the sole aim of improving the technology, and ...