China’s semiconductor developers eye shift to RISC-V architecture amid growing chip demand in cars, data centres and AI, executive says

Many semiconductor design firms aim to adopt open-source RISC-V chip architecture to fast-track projects and avoid the high cost of proprietary systems

Increased RISC-V adoption reflects the urgency in China’s semiconductor sector to cut reliance on foreign chip IP suppliers amid US trade restrictions

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China’s adoption of open-source RISC-V chip architecture, which has experienced fast growth since 2018, is expected to expand into hi-tech applications such as data centres and artificial intelligence. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 7:30pm, 18 May 2023

China’s growing demand for semiconductors used in electric vehicles, high-end servers in data centres and artificial intelligence applications provides a vast opportunity for RISC-V processors to flourish, according to a proponent of the open-source, royalty-free chip design, even as integrated circuits (ICs) built on proprietary Arm and x86 architectures continue to dominate the global market.

That assessment was made by Peng Jianying, chief executive of Shanghai-based RISC-V intellectual property (IP) vendor Nuclei System Technology Co, before an audience of custom auto chip designers at a RISC-V semiconductor event in Beijing on Wednesday.

RISC-V is an open-standard instruction set architecture (ISA), based on established reduced instruction set computer principles, that represents the fifth generation of cooperative projects done by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. Their research on this ISA design was published in 2010.

This architecture has since gained rapid popularity across the global semiconductor industry after its ISA specifications were made available to developers in 2015 under the non-profit RISC-V International, which promotes its development. Adoption in China has experienced fast growth since 2018, the same year when Nuclei – the country’s first RISC-V IP vendor – was founded, Peng said.

“Pricing is one of the biggest factors for chip designers to consider RISC-V IP,” Peng said at the Beijing event.

Peng, a former design engineer at US semiconductor developer Marvell Technology, indicated that many fabless IC design firms in China are looking to switch to RISC-V.