The Linux Foundation has launched a new group, dubbed the CHIPS Alliance, through which it hopes to support the burgeoning free and open source silicon (FOSSi) ecosystem.

Officially announced today by the Linux Foundation, the CHIPS Alliance includes as founding members Esperanto, SiFive, and Western Digital – all of whom have announced or shipped products based around the open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) – alongside cloud and consumer computing giant Google.

“Open collaboration has repeatedly proven to help industries accelerate time to market, achieve long-term maintainability, and create de facto standards,” explains the Linux Foundation’s Mike Dolan. “The same collaboration model applies to the hardware in a system, just as it does to software components. We are eager to host the CHIPS Alliance and invite more organisations to join the initiative to help propel collaborative innovation within the CPU and SoC markets.”

“As new workloads surface every day, we need new silicon designs in order to optimise processing requirements,” adds Martin Fink, interim chief executive of the RISC-V Foundation and executive vice president and chief technical officer of Western Digital. “Today’s legacy general-purpose architectures are, in some cases, decades old.  With the creation of the CHIPS Alliance, we are expecting to fast-track silicon innovation through the open source community.”

The CHIPS Alliance joins an ecosystem which is defined by its collaborative efforts, from the work of the Free and Open Source Silicon (FOSSi) Foundation and the LibreCores project to events including ORConf and the regular RISC-V Workshops, and it will be exciting to see how the CHIPS Alliance fits into the community as it gets underway.

More information is available from the official website.