Author: Gareth Halfacree

Gareth Halfacree is a technology journalist and technical author best known for his work on the Raspberry Pi User Guide and an upcoming book covering the BBC’s micro:bit project. A keen open source advocate and RISC-V fan, Gareth is responsible for curating our fortnightly community round-up posts.

Cocotb Testbench Hits 1.1, Promises More Rapid Release Schedule

Cocotb, the Coroutine-based Cosimulation TestBench for verifying Verilog or VHDL register-transfer level (RTL) designs using Python, has reached its version 1.1 release – and brings with it the promise of a more rapid and streamlined release schedule for the future. “This release is the culmination of work done by 50… Read More

LoRa Alliance LoRaWAN Deployments Map (December 2018)

LoRaWAN Deployments Pass 100 Operators, 100 Country Milestones

The LoRa Alliance, which is behind the open LoRaWAN low-power wide-area network protocol designed with the Internet of Things (IoT) in mind, has announced “explosive growth” which has seen it pass more than 100 network operators in around 100 countries. Designed for minimum power draw and maximum range, LoRaWAN has… Read More

Semiconductor Engineering on RISC-V, FOSSi’s Growing Potential

Semiconductor Engineering’s Brian Bailey has published a piece on the growth of RISC-V, including comment from industry experts including SiFive’s Krste Asanovic and Microsemi’s Ted Speers – and the conclusion that 2019 will be a year of major design wins for the open instruction set architecture. Beginning with a look… Read More

The Kronos Group Calls for Comments on Heterogeneous Communications Standard

The Khronos Group, best known for its work on the OpenGL and OpenCL graphics and compute language standards, has called for feedback on the potential formation of a working group targeting a new low-level, heterogeneous communications standard for high-performance embedded computing (HPEC). Targeting markets ranging from the Internet of Things… Read More

Ground Electronics' SiFive HiFive Unleashed Case

RISC-V Summit 2018 Highlight Video Celebrates a Banner Year

The RISC-V Foundation has released a video highlighting some of the key features of the 2018 RISC-V Summit, held in Santa Clara late last year and attended by over 1,100 community members. To say that the free and open source silicon (FOSSi) movement in general and RISC-V in particular had… Read More

CRU: Raspberry Pi Goes RISC-V, New FOSS Business Model, KiCon 2019, and More

Wave Computing has announced the MIPS Open initiative, under which it plans to make the instruction set architecture (ISA) available free of charge with no licensing or royalty payments required – a clear response to the growing popularity of the open RISC-V ISA. Wave Computing, which acquired MIPS from Imagination… Read More

Design News Picks 2019 as “The Year of Open Source”

Design News’ Chris Wiltz has predicted that 2019 will be “the year of open source,” and while it’s hard to imagine the impact of open source software getting any greater than it already has it’s clear that the impetus behind open hardware is growing at an exponential pace. In the… Read More

Tidelift Promises a “Better Business Model” for Open Source

Tidelift, a company founded by former Red Hat staff which aims to provide sustainable funding to open source projects, has announced a $25 million Series B funding round – on top of $15 million it raised last year. “Tidelift makes it possible for open source creators to get paid for… Read More

Raspberry Pi Foundation Announces RISC-V Foundation Membership

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced its membership of the RISC-V Foundation at the Silver Member tier, offering support for the instruction set architecture on a software – though not yet hardware – level. The original Raspberry Pi launched in February 2012 as a low-cost single-board computer (SBC) primarily targeting… Read More

KiCon 2019 Launches as First KiCad User Conference

The KiCad community is to get its first-ever dedicated conference this year, in the form of KiCon 2019 which is to be held this April in Chicago, USA. Designed to bring together both users and developers of the open-source KiCad electronic design automation (EDA) software suite, KiCon 2019 has been… Read More

VerilogCreator Tunes QtCreator IDE for FPGA Project Use

Engineers working on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) projects and looking for a friendly development environment to add to their toolchain now have a new option: the VerilogCreator plugin for QtCreator. Written by Rochus Keller and brought to our attention by Hackaday, VerilogCreator is designed to turn the QtCreator integrated… Read More

Thales, IIT Madras Partner for Fault-Tolerant SHAKTI RISC-V Processors

Thales, which recently became a member of the RISC-V Foundation, has announced a joint project with IIT Madras to develop a fault-tolerant version of the SHAKTI Project RISC-V CPU. “After the two successful fabrication and booting of SHAKTI with two technology nodes, 22nm (Intel Fab, Oregon USA) and 180nm… Read More