News

The latest on developments at AB Open and across the wider community.

Wuthering Bytes and OSHCamp Dates Confirmed, as the Call for Participation Opens

The dates for this year’s Wuthering Bytes festival and the Open Source Hardware Camp (OSHCamp) have been announced, with a call for participation now open. This year the Wuthering Bytes festival will be taking place in Hebden Bridge from Friday the 23rd to Saturday the 31st of August… Read More

Wuthering Bytes 2023 First Speakers Confirmed

Confirmed speakers include Matthew Venn, a science and technology communicator and electronic engineer, who will be delivering a talk on how to design your own open source microchips. Also joining the line-up is composer, electronic artist and robotic instrument maker Sarah Angliss who will be exploring the life and legacy of Daphne Oram. Read More

Wuthering Bytes Returns for its 10-Year Anniversary, and We’d Love You to be Involved

AB Open is proud to announce the return of Wuthering Bytes, the three-day festival celebrating interesting and inspiring technology now celebrating its 10-year anniversary – and we’re looking for participants to run events or give presentations. After global and local conditions caused a three-year hiatus, AB Open is now… Read More

Efabless’ CLEAR, a Fully-Open RISC-V ASIC Built on chipIgnite, Nears its Goal with Days to Go

CLEAR, a fully-open development board built around a RISC-V embedded-FPGA application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designed by Efabless as a showcase of what its chipIgnite platform can offer, is entering the last days of its crowdfunding campaign with just a handful of boards left to reach its goal. “CLEAR is an… Read More

Ten Reasons to use SiliconCompiler – Including SPDX Provenance Support

Zero ASIC’s chief executive Andreas Olofsson has called for “all chip designers” to try out the open-source SiliconCompiler build system, showcasing his top ten reasons for giving it a go – including a provenance feature which supports the Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) standard. “We have been working hard on… Read More

Chip floorplan example, courtesy Mirhoseini et al.

Google Research Releases Circuit Training, an Open-Source Framework for Automated Chip Floorplanning

Google Research has released the source code for a chip floor-plan generate based on deep reinforcement learning – after publishing a paper demonstrating how effective the approach could be in April last year. “Chip floorplanning is the engineering task of designing the physical layout of a computer chip,” the research… Read More

A Closer Look at the SiFive RISC-V Rack Cluster

SiFive collaborated with AB Open to create a rack-mount RISC-V cluster based around the SiFive HiFive Unmatched developer platform for compute and a SiFive HiFive1 Rev. B development board for control. In this article we take a closer look at the design of the cluster and consider some of the… Read More

Future Corporation Partners with AB Open for Unique RISC-V PC Project

Halifax, UK, 30th November 2021—Open hardware consultancy AB Open has built a unique personal computer based on the free and open source RISC-V instruction set architecture, following a partnership with Future Corporation. Read More

All Invited to the OpenTapeOut Open Source ASIC Design Conference This Weekend

The free and open source silicon community, both established and simply interested, is invited to a new event this weekend: the OpenTapeOut Conference 2021, hosted by Zero to ASIC course creator Matt Venn. “We encourage all of you folks to join us at what we hope will be the start… Read More

Alibaba’s T-Head Releases Four RISC-V Cores Under a Permissive Licence

Alibaba has released the source code for its XuanTie E902, E906, C906, and C910 RISC-V processor cores, promising to follow their release with additional development tools, software development kits, and customisations in the future. Designed by Alibaba’s T-Head semiconductor arm, the XuanTie C906 was launched as a low-power in-order core… Read More

IBM Lowers Barrier to Mainframe Entry with ZD&T Learners Edition Licence

IBM has announced it is making its Z mainframe platform more accessible to those looking to further their skills, launching the Z Development & Test (ZD&T) for Learners Edition – offering a virtualised IBM Z mainframe and a complete software stack for just $120 a year. “ZD&T for Learners Edition… Read More

Open-Source Hardware Will Deliver a “Plethora” of New Devices, Researchers Conclude

Frank Hannig and Jürgen Teich, of the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen- Nürnberg, have penned their thoughts on open-source hardware in the latest issue of IEEE Computer – concluding it will “pave the way to a plethora of new fantastic electronic devices.” “One of the amazing things about open source is that… Read More