US Lawmakers Urge Export Controls on a New Chip Design Technology

A bipartisan group of US lawmakers is calling on the Biden administration to limit China’s access to a budding technology used to design semiconductor chips, which have become a key technological battleground between Washington and Beijing.

Eighteen lawmakers urged Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to impose export controls on RISC-V technology, an open-source model for code that software uses to communicate with semiconductors. Although RISC-V hasn’t yet been widely used in processors that run computers and phones, interest and support from large companies such as Qualcomm Inc. has raised its prospects.