China-made chips infringe on no foreign intellectual property: science academy

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), developer of the 64-bit Godson-2 microprocessor, said Friday that it infringes on no international intellectual property rights.

The CAS announcement referred to recent reports that the Godson architecture is considered as "an imitation" of the chip architecture invented by a US-based chip company, MIPS Technologies.

Godson-2 is about "95 percent MIPS compatible," according to the reports.

Hu Weiwu, principal investigator for the Godson program who works at the CAS Institute of Computing Technology, said, "It's totally inappropriate to charge us with intellectual property infringement on the ground that our chips are 95 percent compatible with MIPS products."

"We built two different apartments, but with two bedrooms each facing the same direction. Could anyone conclude that one copied another?" Hu said.

Hu and his team worked for five years to develop chips in the Godson family. In the past years, he said, most of his team members worked about 80 hours a week. They produced the first Godson chip in 2002 and upgraded it to its latest version of Godson-2, which roughly equals to Pentium III in technical performance.

"In general concepts," Hu said, "many well-known brands have 95 percent similarity."

"But at the micro-architecture level," he added, "Godson-2 is a totally different story from the MIPS chip."

MIPS develops a unique repertoire with 12 unaligned memory access instructions. The US company has obtained patents for such instructions in the United States, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Canada and Australia.

"We didn't copy their repertoire and Godson-2 is run in a different way," Hu said.

The possible infringement dispute was aroused by a report done by a US market research firm, In-Stat.

China is already capable of designing world-class microprocessors, In-Stat said. The only restraint on their performance is that Chinese chip-fabrication technology lags about two generations behind the rest of the industry.

However, China is catching up fast and the Chinese could gain access to state-of-the-art fabrication technology by outsourcing some manufacturing

to independent foundries outside China, the firm said.

China's ambition to make its own microprocessors will affect microprocessor vendors all over the world, In-Stat expected.

"The In-Stat assessment on Godson-2 is mostly objective," Hu said, "but some content of the assessment was distorted by a few irresponsible mass media outlets."

Hu acknowledged that his research and development team used to label Godson-2 as "MIPS-like" for marketing benefits.

"We're now realizing that it was not wise to do so," Hu said.

Li Guojie, a Chinese Academy of Engineering academician who also heads the CAS institute, said, "We always keep high alert on our intellectual property strategy and try to evade any traps laid by foreign companies."

"As for Godson-1 and Godson-2," Li said, "We've applied for more than 20 patents of invention with some having been granted."

Huo Yutao, a Beijing-based information technology analyst, said, as more and more consumer-electronics embedded with Chinese-made microprocessors are exported overseas, more intellectual property disputes are likely to occur.

Source: Xinhua