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.

OSDDI: Jonathan Balkind, OpenPiton

Back in 2006 Sun Microsystems made the bold move of open sourcing the RTL code for their UltraSPARC T1 processor via the OpenSPARC project. Targeted at data centre applications and with a full configuration featuring 8x cores and 32x hardware threads, the processor was used in Sun and Fujitsu systems,… Read More

OSDDI: Elkim Roa, OnChip UIS

A modern microntroller or system-on-chip is much more than simply a processor and some digital peripherals, typically integrating a selection of analogue IP also. In this latest episode of Open Source Digital Design Insights we speak with Professor Elkim Roa, Head of the OnChip Group at UIS Colombia, who… Read More

OSDDI: Davide Rossi, PULP Platform

The IoT and sensor network focused Parallel Ultra Low Power (PULP) platform is described as a “silicon-proven parallel platform for ultra-low power computing targeting high energy efficiencies”. It is organised in clusters of RISC-V cores that share tightly coupled data memory and comprised of IPs described in SystemVerilog. The… Read More

The Flashing Light Prize Returns

Delightfully bonkers award issues call for ingenious and unusual ways of flashing a bulb, tube or other vessel that contains neon gas. The inaugural Flashing Light Prize sought novel approaches to flashing an incandescent light bulb — and the entries certainly did not disappoint, with the winner… Read More

Rust Comes to RISC-V

RISC-V architecture gets support for language that enables development of highly concurrent and highly safe systems. The Rust language has a syntax that is similar to C/C++ and is targeted at the development of systems that are both highly concurrent and safe, finding use in everything from a microkernel O/S… Read More

Hands-on with the LoRa Explorer

Pocketable LoRaWAN development platform from SODAQ and Microchip combines Arduino ease with all the features needed to start developing fully untethered applications right away. A little while Microchip were kind enough to send us a SODAQ Explorer board and the other night I finally got round to running up… Read More

OSDDI: Clifford Wolf, Yosys

Over the last couple of years the maker movement has seen a significant growth in interest in FPGA development, with a great deal of activity being focused around the Lattice iCE40 platform, thanks in no small part to the availability of a fully open source FPGA toolchain to use with… Read More

OSDDI: lowRISC, Alex Bradbury

lowRISC is a fantastic initiative to build a fully open source, Linux-capable, 64-bit RISC-V based system-on-chip. Not only this, but a SoC design with additional interesting features such as programmable I/O — think along the lines of XMOS devices — and tagged memory. Read More