When a Beijing-based military institute in September published a patent for a new high-performance chip, it offered a glimpse of China's bid to remake the half-trillion dollar global chip market and withstand U.S. sanctions.

The People's Liberation Army's (PLA) Academy of Military Sciences had used an open-source standard known as RISC-V to reduce malfunctions in chips for cloud computing and smart cars, the patent filing shows.

RISC-V is an instruction set architecture, a computer language used to design anything from smartphone chips to advanced processors for artificial intelligence.