How can Huawei bypass the US ban to gain access to critical CPU technology?

Throughout its history, MIPS changed its name and carried out many IPOs. But in a surprising development, the company is now under the control of a Chinese company.

As a result, Chinese companies can now license the use of critical microprocessor architecture-related intellectual property from MIPS and develop their own SoCs for a variety of purposes. without fear of any US ban.

US bans

Since 2018, the US government has been tightening restrictions on direct investment from China in American startups to prevent China from controlling new technologies.

In addition, many Chinese companies – most notably Huawei Technologies and its subsidiaries – have been placed on the US Commerce Department’s “blacklist”, which requires them to obtain a license. Especially new access to technologies developed in the US in general.

This has prevented Huawei and some other companies from working with many partners in the US. But it’s clear that, thanks to a series of acquisitions and licensing deals, Chinese high-tech companies can still access technologies developed by MIPS – one of the developers. The oldest CPU development comes from California.

MIPS to change owner name

MIPS Computer Systems was founded in the early 1980s by a group of scientists from Stanford University who are working on a project called “Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages” (MIPS).

The researchers here have successfully developed the MIPS architecture and many cores based on it, and then licensed their technology to other companies to design true CPUs on MIPS-based platforms.

The company was quite successful from 1980 to 1992, then was acquired by Silicon Graphics Inc (SGI) to develop “home-made” CPUs with higher performance thanks to the components provided by the competitor.

SGI separated MIPS in 1998, and MIPS became a public company, continuing the licensing model. While not as successful as Arm, MIPS licensed its CPU cores to a variety of companies, making chips for a wide range of applications.

In 2013, Imagination Technologies realized that in order to compete with Arm, they needed CPU intellectual property in addition to existing GPU intellectual property, so IT bought MIPS, and that was when the headwinds started with this microprocessor company. At the beginning of 2017, Apple announced its plan to stop using Imagination GPUs for two years, and even though there was not much information disclosed, Imagination’s shares still plummeted, leading to the decision of the Board to sell. company to a private investor.

China-owned Canyon Bridge Company acquired ImgTec in late 2017, but aimed to avoid the scrutiny of the Foreign Investment Commission in the United States (CFIUS), an organization that reviews early projects. From foreign investors, MIPS was spun off from ImgTec before the deal was finalized.

In September 2017, MIPS was acquired by Tallwood Venture Capital under the leadership of Diosdado P. Banatao, co-founder of Mostron, Chips and Technologies, and S3 Graphics.

Banatao then transferred ownership of MIPS to Wave Computing in mid-2018, which is a company owned by Banatao and Alibaba. Wave Computing subsequently transferred the licensing rights of MIPS to a company registered in Samoa named Prestige Century Investment under a debt settlement agreement. Prestige Century Investments turns out to be the owner of CIP United, a registered company in China.

CIP United now fully controls the licensing rights of MIPS to all customers in China, Hong Kong and Macau, and is capable of designing new technologies based on the MIPS architecture. You must have guessed by now: Huawei Technologies is one of the companies that buys CIP and MIPS licenses.

But what about software and production?

As CIP United now controls intellectual property developed by MIPS (intellectual property only in China), their clients can access these intellectual property and develop SoC for many other applications. Each other, starting with sensors and controllers for SSDs, to self-driving cars and CPUs used in supercomputers. However, there are two challenges for companies using the MIPS architecture: software support and production.

The MIPS architecture is not supported by Google’s Android operating system like Arm’s architecture. Companies that buy MIPS licenses either rely on other operating systems, or have to adapt open source Android to their needs. For many companies that buy MIPS licenses, the lack of Android support is not a big deal, as they develop for applications using many different operating systems. In fact, many MIPS-based devices end up using specialized software.

Meanwhile, a tech giant like Huawei has the resources to tailor open-source Android to its needs.

But Huawei has another problem. They cannot cooperate with any of the contract semiconductor manufacturers using technology developed in the US, which means every manufacturer, including TSMC in Taiwan as well as SMIC in China.

Huawei’s inaccessibility to such manufacturers has also rendered Huawei’s chip design prowess useless. Will the company find a “detour” to deal with this adversity?

Made in China 2025

Huawei is one of the biggest tech companies in China, but for the government, the “Made in China 2025” plan is seen as much more important than a single company, because of its goals. This is opening up a new multi-billion dollar industry that doesn’t depend on foreign investment or technology.

The number of Chinese chip designers has increased from 736 in 2015 to 1,780 in 2017. Many of these companies need CPU intellectual property and some don’t necessarily use Arm. To them, the MIPS and RISC-V architectures are two good options and MIPS has an advantage over RISC-V at this point.

MIPS has high-performance CPU cores available for sale that can be on par with Arm’s Cortex-A70 or Neoverse series, but companies can use the MIPS architecture to develop things powerful enough for use. server. For example, Loongson Technology of China has developed the MIPS64 CPU for client and server devices, and there is also a Green500 supercomputer based on the MIPS CPU.

Having unlimited access to MIPS CPUs and other intellectual property is probably of vital importance not only to certain companies, but to the entire “Made in China” plan. 2025 “.

Reference: TechRadar