Open source hardware means that the design of hardware is shared between individuals and companies, and in many cases they are also collaborating on different projects. The projects are very diverse and go from pure hobby projects to serious large scale projects involving big companies. Like for free open source software there are different non-profit organisations coordinating and promoting it and there are different possible licence agreements.
One of the more transcendental free open source hardware projects is RISC-V, an “Instruction Set Architecture” (ISA) for computer chips as an interface between the software and the hardware. Your computer is likely to have a chip based on Intel’s x86 ISA, while your phone is almost sure to have a chip based on an ARM ISA. Intel and AMD produce x86 chips, while ARM licences its ISA to different chip producers (charging a hefty fee).
Other companies have tried to break into this duopoly, for example PowerPC (IBM), SPARC and MIPS, but have not been successful. Comes open source RISC-V. It started as a research project at the University of Berkley in 2010 and “aimed to create a new, open-source ISA that would address the limitations of existing proprietary ISAs and provide a foundation for future processor designs. There are now members in over 70 countries contributing and collaborating to define RISC-V open specifications”.
A non-profit organisation was set up in 2015, called the RISC-V Foundation, collaborating closely with the Linux Foundation. When former President Donald Trump started sanctioning Chinese companies, a new organisation called RISC-V International was set up hastily in Switzerland in 2020 to avoid getting caught up in Trump’s sanctions scheme. RISC-V International steers development of the ISA, but does not design chips.
As China (and Russia) are active participants in and contributors to the development of open source RISC-V, this caught the attention of the sanction lobby in the US Congress. A group of lawmakers, including Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Democratic Senator Mark Warner, were urging Biden's administration to take action regarding RISC-V, citing national security grounds. "The 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 tech transfer strategy (to China) that serves to degrade U.S. export control laws," Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee”, said in a statement to Reuters.
Chinese company Starfive is very active developing RISC-V processors. On the picture a single board Linux computer called VisionFive 2 which costs 99 USD on Amazon (with 64bit Processor, on board GPU, 8GB RAM, WiFi & HDMI).
What they fail to understand is that RISC-V is only an agreed set of instructions, it is like an open standard for chip development. As Andrew Huang, a well-known hardware hacker and author, stated: “Chip designers around the world, from the USA and Europe to India, China, and Japan, are free to create processors and other components that are compatible with it, and have done so and are expected to keep doing so. A good deal of RISC-V designs and software are open source, though that openness is not required: you can make a RISC-V-compatible processor yourself, using the open ISA, and keep the blueprints private, if you so wished.”
So what would the effect be of prohibiting US citizens and companies from contributing to the international work on RISC-V? They would exclude themselves from an evolving international technological eco-system. The Lawmakers wrote that “...the United States should build a robust ecosystem for open-source collaboration among the U.S. and our allies while ensuring (China) is unable to benefit from that work”. This is impossible. You can’t have open source and restrictions at the same time. It is either or.
Should the US succeed in splitting up the RISC-V collaboration in allies and foes, China would probably simply clone RISC-V (as this open source) and continue the work together with other interested parties. “...the RISC-V ISA is a concept and not a thing. The RISC-V Foundation does not sell processors or licenses. China’s interest in RISC-V suggests it is more about building a future that is not beholden to the whims of others. For this very reason, RISC-V will grow everywhere — including China.”
But is it really a possibility that RISC-V seriously will challenge the INTEL/AMD and ARM duopoly? Conventional wisdom has it that RISC-V has a future mainly in small, specialised chips (micro controllers), the ones in your refrigerator, coffee machine and so on, but that it will take years before they will enter the smart-phones and even longer before it enters computers and servers. I am not so sure, not least because the US sanctions have convinced many countries to invest in RISC-V, including of course China and Russia, but also for example Japan, India, Brazil and the EU (through the European Processor Initiative). Qualcomm, which dominates the production of mobile phone processors with licence from ARM, announced in October 2023 that it is developing a RISC-V processor together with Google (to make sure it can run Android). In China RISC-V servers have been deployed, Huawei has announced that their OpenHarmony operating system supports RISC-V (even if their phones still run on ARM), and the first RISC-V laptops have appeared in China. So things are moving. And my bet is that the pace will accelerate as it tends to do for successful innovations.
Most of the big technology companies are members of RISC-V Foundation: Google, Qualcomm, Alibaba, ZTE, Huawei, Micron, Samsung, IBM, etc. Even companies that are threatened by this new technology as Intel and AMD have joined. Image: RISC-V Foundation.
While RISC-V is without comparison the biggest open source hardware project around, the list of other projects is actually quite impressive, even if many are small educational or hobby projects. Worth mentioning is one with a quite broad impact: the Arduino open source Hardware and Software Project. It was started as an educational project in 2003 by a group of academics at the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy. The platform was named after a bar in the same town where they met to discuss the project. One of the project's goals was to remove the barrier of entry for students who wanted to realize automation ideas but did not have enough resources to purchase expensive controllers or knowledge to build their printed circuit boards. The hardware is a simple and cheap printed circuit board which acts like a small computer compatible with Windows, MacOS and Linux. The software is a simple open source programming language, Arduino IDE. As it is open source hardware, students and hobbyist can build the boards themselves from scratch, or they can buy it, original, cloned or similar, from commercial companies. But is can also be used by small companies to create their own hardware/software solutions mostly in the field of microcontrollers and meters. I bought for example a commercial monitoring programme for our solar system from a small South African company called Solar Assistant. You download an image and then flash it to an open source Orange PI micro computer from China (which costs around 50 USD). It works nicely. There is competition coming for the established companies producing Programable Logical Controllers (PLC), as Siemens, Mitsibishi, Schneider, Rockwell and the like.
So my conclusion is that open source hardware has a great future. It can challenge big, established companies and bring much benefit to the participating individuals and companies, particularly small and medium enterprises. Regarding RISC-V, it is tempting for ARM customers, as it is open source and modular, so they are free to design their own chips for their specific use and there is no royalty payment. ARM is already worried about the challenge and claims that it is reducing its royalty and flexibilizing its licence conditions permitting customers more freedom in chip design. So the challenge from RISC-V is already working as it should! The next to start looking over their shoulder should be the fat cats Intel and AMD. They are coming for you!
Cooperation is a powerful force!
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This is the third article on cooperative man. To read the first and second articles click on the links below:
1. Humans may be self-interested, but they are also cooperative and self-sacrificing
2. Sometimes cooperation beats profit-seeking
