In its continued effort to reduce reliance on foreign technologies (particularly U.S.-made), China has been mostly focusing on getting up to speed with the hardware production facilities. The chip production nodes still lag behind TSMC’s capabilities, but China is making good progress as it already has working 7 nm nodes. To complement the hardware side, China has meanwhile managed to complete the development of its first self-developed processor instruction set that apparently does not conflict with foreign CPU patents.
Dubbed “Loong Arch,” China’s first domestic CPU instruction set was developed by Loongson Chuka Technology Co. Ltd. in less than a year and has recently received approval from a third-party IP evaluator. The white papers for “Loong Arch” were compared to tens of thousands of patents using code from the Alpha, ARM, MIPS, Power, RISC-V and x86 sets and the evaluation revealed that the design and address format are original and do not conflict with other patents. Loongson will soon be able to provide all Chinese partners with detailed “Loong Arch” white papers and IP integration guidance.