US President Joe Biden’s administration is under pressure from some lawmakers to forbid American companies from working on a freely available chip technology that is widely used in China, opening a new front in the U.S.-China tech conflict that could fundamentally alter how the international technology sector collaborates.

RISC-V, or “risk five,” is the in question, an open-source technology that competes with pricey proprietary technology from British semiconductor and software design company Arm Holdings. From smartphone chips to cutting-edge artificial intelligence computers, RISC-V can be a significant component.

Some senators are pressing Biden’s administration to take action on RISC-V on the basis of national security, including two Republican chairs of House of Representatives committees, Republican Senator Marco Rubio, and Democratic Senator Mark Warner.

The congressmen voiced worry that Beijing is utilising an atmosphere of open collaboration among American businesses to promote its own semiconductor industry, which might weaken the U.S. position in the chip industry and aid China in modernising its armed forces. Their remarks are the first significant attempt to impose limitations on RISC-V development being done by American businesses.

Chairman of the House select committee on China, Representative Mike Gallagher, stated in a statement that the Commerce Department should “require any American person or company to receive an export licence prior to engaging with PRC (People’s Republic of China) entities on RISC-V technology.”

These proposals for RISC-V regulation are the most recent in a fight between the United States and China over chip technology that heated up last year with broad export limits that the Biden administration has promised to revise this month.

“The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is abusing RISC-V to get around U.S. dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips. U.S. persons should not be supporting a PRC tech transfer strategy that serves to degrade U.S. export control laws,” Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement.

McCaul stated that if the Bureau of Industry and Security—the division of the Commerce Department responsible for export-control regulations—does not take action, he will pursue legislative action.

The bureau “is constantly reviewing the technology landscape and threat environment, and continually assessing how to best apply our export control policies to protect national security and safeguard core technologies,” a representative for the Commerce Department said in a statement.

“Communist China is developing open-source chip architecture to dodge our sanctions and grow its chip industry,” Rubio said in a statement to Reuters. “If we don’t broaden our export controls to include this threat, China will one day surpass us as the global leader in chip design.”

“I fear that our export-control laws are not equipped to deal with the challenge of open-source software – whether in advanced semiconductor designs like RISC-V or in the area of AI – and a dramatic paradigm shift is needed,” Warner said in a statement to Reuters.

A nonprofit foundation with its headquarters in Switzerland is in charge of RISC-V, which coordinates the work of for-profit businesses to develop the technology.

The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a division of the Pentagon, later provided financing for the RISC-V technology, which originated in Berkeley University of California labs. Its developers have compared it to open technologies like Ethernet, USB, and even the internet, which rely on contributions from all around the world and accelerate and reduce the cost of innovation.

Executives from Huawei Technologies in China have adopted RISC-V as a cornerstone of their country’s advancement in creating its own processors.

However, the United States and its allies have also seized on the technology. Chipmaker Qualcomm is working on RISC-V chips with a group of European automotive companies, and Alphabet’s Google has announced that it will make Android, the most popular mobile operating system in the world, compatible with RISC-V chips.

Qualcomm opted not to respond. Its executives stated in August that they thought RISC-V will accelerate semiconductor innovation and revolutionise the computer sector.

There were no comments available on the issue from Google.

If the regulation sought by Congress were to be implemented by the Biden administration, it would likely make it more difficult for American and Chinese businesses to collaborate on open technical standards. Additionally, it might make it more difficult for China to achieve semiconductor self-sufficiency and for American and European attempts to develop less expensive, more versatile processors.

Potential U.S. government restrictions on American businesses employing RISC-V, according to Jack Kang, vice president of business development at SiFive, a Santa Clara, California-based startup that uses the technology, would be a “tremendous tragedy.”

“It would be like banning us from working on the internet,” Kang said. “It would be a huge mistake in terms of technology, leadership, innovation and companies and jobs that are being created.”

According to Kevin Wolf, an export-control lawyer with the law firm Akin Gump who previously worked in the Commerce Department under former President Barack Obama, regulating the open discussion of technologies is more uncommon than regulating actual things, but it is not impossible. According to Wolf, a legal framework for such a proposal might be provided by the current regulations on chip exports.

(Adapted from TheDailyStar.net)