Huawei and HiSilicon abandon ARM and switch to an open source alternative

Huawei and HiSilicon abandon ARM and switch to an open source alternative

In an effort to overcome US restrictions on ARM projects, Huawei-owned HiSilicon decided to move to the open source RISC-V architecture and even made its first RISC-V card available to Harmony OS developers. Due to blacklisting by the US government, Huawei and its HiSilicon chip division do not have access to American-designed development and manufacturing technologies. The restrictions include many ARM processor architectures, including those used in various microcontrollers that Huawei uses extensively.

The HiSilicon Hi3861 development board is based on the same company's Hi3861 controller. Huawei's documentation doesn't exactly reveal the chip's potential, but describes it as a main controller. The Hi3861 chip is accompanied by a serial port controller and a USB-C port. Among the most important aspects, Hi3861 seems to have all the logical part that enables USB-C functionality (for example, port synchronization and alignment) and GPIO pins (generic). Overall, the HiSilicon Hi3861 development board has quite extensive capabilities (at least similar to the Raspberry Pi), but it's not meant for the markets the company has focused on over the past few years.

Hi3861 is aimed primarily at the IoT market, while HiSilicon's development efforts have historically been aimed at smartphones, tablets, PCs and embedded systems. However, Huawei needs computing platforms to use for several of its devices. When it comes to high-volume products made by Huawei, a non-ARM-based chip makes a lot of sense and also offers the company the ability to work with an open source architecture. Only time will tell if the company will build RISC-V chips for even more powerful devices.

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