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Several lawmakers are pressuring the Biden administration to impose trade restrictions on technologies using RISC-V architecture. For those who haven’t been closely watching the processor architecture space, 1) for SHAME and 2) RISC-V is an open-source chipset architecture meant to compete with the likes of closed-source and proprietary solutions like ARM and x86.
I strongly believe that RISC-V will be widely adopted by the industry in the next decade, but to date the implementations still amount to little more than prototypes and PoCs. China, who is currently under many trade embargoes and sanctions when it comes to chip technology, is quite interested in the nascent RISC-V field and US congress critters don’t like that one bit.
Mike Gallagher, the chairman of the House select committee on China said the Commerce Department should, “require any American person or company to receive an export license prior to engaging with PRC entities on RISC-V technology.” The thing is, with RISC-V being open-source, it’s pretty hard to restrict who has access to the standard. Does this mean that anyone in the US contributing to the RISC-V codebase needs to get an export license just in case China downloads the repo?
As usual, lawmakers completely fail to understand technology and are attempting to treat it like some physical asset. So, um, par for the course. Fortunately, nothing is likely to happen in the short term due to political machinations in the House that are so deeply stupid I refuse to acknowledge them.