Author: Andrew Back

Andrew Back has in excess of 20 years industry experience that spans IT infrastructure, telecommunications and electronics, and covering R&D through to architecture, strategy and governance.

HiFive Unleashed Gets Packed PolarFire Powered Expansion

World’s first Linux-capable RISC-V development board benefits from expansion that adds PCIe, M.2 SSD, SATA, HDMI, a 300K element PolarFire FPGA, and more. Launched back in February at FOSDEM the HiFive Unleashed RISC-V development board boasts a 64-bit Freedom U540 SoC with features that include a 4+1 Multi-Core Coherent… Read More

Wireshark Gets Support for Osmocom Generic Subscriber Update Protocol

Popular free and open source network analysis tool gains support for lightweight GSUP protocol used between Osmocom HLR, and MSC and SGSN, cellular network components. With its first release back in 1998 when it was still named Ethereal, the Wireshark packet analyser is now over 20 years old and… Read More

GNU Tools Cauldron Comes to Manchester (UK) in September

Annual conference for developers of the GNU Toolchain to be hosted at University of Manchester from the 7th through to 9th September 2018. The GNU Tools Cauldron is an annual fixture in the calendar of developers of GCC, GDB, binutils and runtimes etc. Having previously been hosted at venues including… Read More

Six Years of Progress in Open Source Mobile Infrastructure

A look at open source cellular progress over the past six years and more recent developments which suggest that a bright future lays ahead. Six years ago today The H – Open published an article I wrote entitled, Building a GSM network with open source. In this I covered… Read More

OSDDI: Dr Jeremy Bennett, Embecosm

In the latest episode of Open Source Digital Design Insights we hear from Dr Jeremy Bennett, CEO of Embecosm, on the numerous motivations for open source silicon, its already modestly successful if largely unknown history, through LEON and OpenRISC ASIC manufacture, Embecosm’s own work on the… Read More

LibreCores launches El Correo Libre Newsletter

LibreCores launch newsletter for the free and open source silicon community, with news on everything from personal projects, through to research and industry developments. The inaugural edition of the El Correo Libre newsletter was published today and features news items on Google Summer of Code 2018, TinyFPGA, the 4th generation… Read More

Bunnie Huang Makes Case for Open Hardware Consumer Products

Slowing of Moore’s law, virtuous feedback cycle and ecosystem benefits cited among the motivations for making consumer products with designs that anyone can study and modify. In a Business Impact interview for MIT Technology Review Andrew “Bunnie” Huang makes the case for hackable consumer products, noting how “The slowing… Read More

Solderpad Hardware Licence Gets New Release

Version 2.0 release of Solderpad Hardware Licence is simplified and presented as a wraparound to the Apache 2.0 software license. The Solderpad Hardware Licence is based upon the popular Apache 2.0 software license, which in contrast to simpler permissive software licences such as BSD and MIT, provides greater clarity… Read More

The Things Network Launches Collos Geolocation Integration

Integration with the Collos collaborative location service from Semtech enables geolocation via TDOA and RSSI, with the option of WiFi augmented TDOA for WLAN enabled nodes. Initiator of The Things Network, Wienke Giezeman, this morning announced that geolocation over LoRa is now available on The Things Network. This comes… Read More

Open Source Software Compliance in the Supply Chain Event (London, 22/03)

On Thursday 22nd March the BCS Open Source Specialist Group and Open Source Hardware User Group will host a free-to-attend event dedicated to the topic of open source software compliance in the supply chain. The ever increasing complexity of embedded device software stacks, coupled with the proliferation of new mechanisms… Read More

Multi-core 64-bit Linux-capable RISC-V Board Unveiled and Available to Pre-order

HiFive Unleashed demonstrated at FOSDEM 2018 running Linux, presentation software and a Quake port, with first boards to ship in around 8 weeks time. In a presentation entitled, Igniting the Open Hardware Ecosystem with RISC-V, we first heard from SiFive’s Palmer Dabbelt, who provided a background to… Read More

ORConf 2018 Announced

The Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation has announced that ORConf 2018 will be held over the weekend of September 21st to 23rd in Gdansk, Poland. Now in its seventh year, ORConf is a free to attend conference for open source digital, semiconductor and embedded systems design engineers. Read More