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 1. Home
 2. News

Huawei's HiSilicon Develops First RISC-V Design to Overcome Arm
Restrictions

By Anton Shilov 23 May 2021

Circumvention

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Comments (0)
CPU
(Image credit: Panasonic)

In a bid to overcome US restrictions on its Arm designs, Huawei's
HiSilicon has turned to the open-source RISC-V architecture and has
even released its first RISC-V board for Harmony OS developers. Due
to being blacklisted by the U.S. government, Huawei and its chip
division HiSilicon do not have access to development and production
technologies designed in America. The restrictions include many Arm
processor architectures, including those used in various
microcontrollers that Huawei uses widely.

HiSilicon's HiSilicon Hi3861 development board is based on the
company's own Hi3861 controller. Huawei's documentation doesn't
disclose exactly what the chip does, but it describes it as a main
controller chip. The Hi3861 chip is accompanied by a serial port
controller as well as a USB-C port. Among the more important aspects,
the Hi3861 seems to have all the logic that enables USB-C
functionality (e.g., synchronization and port alignment) and GPIO
(general-purpose) pins. 

HiSilicon

(Image credit: HiSilicon)

Overall, the HiSilicon Hi3861 development board has rather vast (at
least Raspberry Pi-like) capabilities, but not for a world that
Huawei's HiSilicon is used to, at least in terms of public opinion.

HiSilicon

(Image credit: HiSilicon)

The Hi3861 is aimed mostly at the IoT market, whereas HiSilicon's
development efforts were historically aimed at high-margin
smartphones, tablets, PCs, and embedded systems. But Huawei needs
computing platforms to use for its other devices, so the HiSilicon
Hi3861 is just what the doctor ordered at this time.

When it comes to high-volume products made by Huawei, a non-Arm-based
chip makes exceptional sense and also gives the company experience
working with an open-source architecture. Only time will tell if the
company uses its RISC-V experience to develop other, more powerful
devices. 

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