US Republican lawmakers are urging the Biden administration to strengthen its sanctions against Huawei and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) to prevent the Chinese tech giants from getting access to chip-manufacturing tools and chip-design resources.
After US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on October 4 that reports of Huawei’s recent 7-nanometer chip breakthrough were “incredibly disturbing,” US House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul and Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House Select Committee on China, called for “full blocking” sanctions against Huawei.
In a letter to national security adviser Jake Sullivan, the congressional duo said the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) “does not understand China’s industrial policy, does not understand China’s military goals and does not understand technology at all – and does not have the will to act.”
“From granting SMIC validated end-user status in 2007 to decontrolling chip production tools, including lithography machines, in 2015 to a loophole-riddled licensing policy for SMIC’s entity listing in 2020, the BIS has been enabling SMIC’s rise for more than a decade,” they said.
McCaul and Gallagher also said the BIS must stop companies in China from circumventing US export control rules announced on October 7, 2022, and entity listings making the provision of cloud computing subject to licensing requirements.
Reuters reported on October 6 that an updated rule curbing exports of US chip-making equipment to China is in the final stages of review. In a hint of the updates to come, a regulation titled “Export Controls to Semiconductor Manufacturing Items, Entity List Modifications,” was posted on the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) website on October 4.
Export control rules are generally not posted by the OMB until there is agreement among the departments of State, Defense, Commerce and Energy on their content, Reuters reported, citing former officials. The updates would add restrictions and close loopholes in rules first unveiled on October 7, 2022, the Reuters report said.
An anticipated companion rule updating restrictions on exports of high-end chips used for artificial intelligence has yet to be posted by the US government.
Separately, Gallagher told Reuters in a statement that the Commerce Department should “require any American person or company to receive an export license prior to engaging with Chinese entities on RISC-V,“ which is an open-source technology that can be used to design semiconductors.
Chinese commentators have mixed views about the possible move to impose more sanctions on Huawei and SMIC.
“Some US politicians suggested that the US should restrict its firms from contributing to open-source technology, especially in projects that involve Chinese firms,” Lyu Dong, a columnist at Guancha.com, says in an article. “This approach has made a lot of people in the technology sector speechless.”
Lyu adds: “This is a suggestion that will not help boost the competitiveness of the US firms, but reduce their global market shares…. The US does not have any advantage in developing RISC-V. It’s not that China is using American firms to advance its technologies. The reality is that US firms need China’s markets to grow.”
Zhang Tengjun, deputy director and associate research fellow at the Department for American Studies, China Institute of International Studies, told the Communist Party-run Global Times that “both McCaul and Gallagher are Republicans. They want to give pressure to the Biden administration and push forward the technological decoupling between China and the US.”
“They also want to cater to the needs of local anti-China forces by exaggerating the ‘China threat’ to promote their political agenda,” Zhang opined. “The Biden administration will have its own assessment as it understands that it will be a lose-lose situation if the US imposes more sanctions on China.”
On the other hand, a Beijing-based columnist on Monday published an article with the title “Restrictions on RISC-V will pose threats to China.”
“The US government’s restrictive controls on RISC-V may make it difficult for China to obtain and use this technology. This will create obstacles for China’s technological progress and innovation in chip design and manufacturing,” he columnist wrote in the article.
Besides, he says, restrictions on RISC-V may hurt China’s chip technology investments as investors are usually inclined to invest in technology areas with clear regulations.
Arm vs RISC-V
On August 29, Huawei launched its new smartphone Mate60 Pro in a low-profile manner during Raimondo’s visit to Beijing. TechInsights, a Canadian research firm, found that the phone’s Kirin 9000s processor was made by SMIC using its N+2 technology.
Analysis found out that the Kirin 9000s chip contains four high-performance Taishan V120 cores and two Arm Cortex A510 energy-efficient cores. Huawei has reportedly bought a permanent license to use the Arm V8 instruction set developed by the United Kingdom-based Arm Holdings Plc, which is now owned by Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp.
As the US contributed key technologies to Arm’s architecture, it banned Huawei from using the V9 architecture. Because of this, Huawei built the Taishan architecture but still has to rely on the Arm one, the same analysis shows
Some IT columnists said it is possible that Huawei’s HarmonyOS and the open-source RISC-V architecture will become China’s operating system-chipset ecosystem in the future.
“The world’s two main operating system-chipset ecosystems are the ‘Wintel’ (Windows OS and Intel’s x86 architecture) and ‘A-A’ (Android OS and the Arm architecture) systems,” a Hunan-based writer says in an article. “Of course there is also the ‘I-A’ (Apple’s iOS and the Arm architecture) system but it’s a closed system.”
“If HarmonyOS and RISC-V can become China’s ecosystem, it will have a very important meaning to our information technology sector,” he says, citing a recent collaboration between HarmonyOS and Alibaba’s TH1520 RISC-V processor.
Chinese media said the RISC-V Foundation’s Chinese members include Huawei, ZTE, Alibaba, Unisoc and Tencent while its American members include Intel, Google, Qualcomm and SiFive.
Founded in 2015, the RISC-V Foundation said about 10 billion RISC-V processors have been produced globally and that the figure will grow to 80 billion units by 2025.
Apart from McCaul and Gallagher, Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Democratic Senator Mark Warner have also urged President Joe Biden’s administration to take action on RISC-V, citing national-security grounds.
Rubio said China is developing open-source chip architecture to dodge US sanctions and grow its chip industry.
Warner said the existing export-control rules are not equipped to deal with the challenge of open-source software in RISC-V or in the area of artificial intelligence. He said a dramatic paradigm shift is needed.
Read: Raimondo wants more and better tools to curb Huawei
Follow Jeff Pao on Twitter at @jeffpao3