The race for semiconductor supremacy is fuelling geopolitical tensions between the world’s superpowers. But a Swiss-based open-source technology aims to prevent a few dominant countries and companies from holding all the chips. + Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox Just as the open-source Linux operating system has long challenged software market leaders such as Microsoft, the RISC-V (pronounced ‘Risk Five’) movement is on a mission to disrupt monopolies in hardware. The RISC-V International Association has sat in relative obscurity in Zurich for the last six years. The non-profit is the guardian of the RISC-V open-source “Instruction Set Architecture” (ISA), a piece of technology that could grant smaller companies greater freedom in what kind of computerised tools they can build. ISAs form a critical bridge between software and hardware. They translate complex computer code into operational instructions for chips. Every computerised device needs one. Without …