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.

RISC-V Foundation, Linux Foundation Join Forces for a “New Era of Open Architecture”

The RISC-V Foundation and the Linux Foundation have announced a joint initiative which they claim will “enable a new era of open architecture” and “accelerate open source development and adoption of the RISC-V ISA [Instruction Set Architecture].” “With the rapid international adoption of the RISC-V ISA, we need increased scale… Read More

Thales Joins RISC-V Foundation, Praises ISA’s Protection from “Cyber Threats”

Thales Group, best known for its work in aerospace, defence, transportation, and security, has announced it has joined the RISC-V Foundation, declaring its commitment to “free, open-source hardware architectures based on RISC-V processors.” Founded in 2000 as the next stage from 1968-founded Thomson-CSF, which in turn was an evolution of… Read More

JuxtaPiton Merges OpenSPARC, RISC-V Soft-cores

Princeton University’s OpenPiton free and open source silicon (FOSSi) project has announced what is claimed to be the world’s first open-source, general-purpose, heterogeneous-ISA processor: JuxtaPiton. Built by combining the SPARC v9-based OpenPiton with Clifford Wolf’s PicoRV32 RISC-V core, JuxtaPiton is something unique. “JuxtaPiton inherits all of the capabilities of OpenPiton,… Read More

OPRECOMP Offers Funding for Open-Source Transprecision Computing Projects

Frank Gurkaynak, director of the Microelectronics Design Centre at ETZ Zürich, has announced a 2019 “summer of code” programme that will see a selection of open-source project proposals granted up to €6,000 in funding as part of the Open Transprecision Computing (PRECOMP) project. “First of all, what is Transprecision computing?… Read More

David Freitag's Reverse Engineering Image

Reverse-Engineering Via Desoldering Station, Sandpaper, and Scanner

Reverse engineering is often a high-tech, expensive endeavour – but David Freitag’s latest project takes it down to the bare essentials, attacking a USB 3.0 eMMC reader board with nothing more than a desoldering station, sandpaper, and a flatbed scanner. “Say there’s a Chinese silicon vendor which designs and sells… Read More

CRU: RISC-V Security, GraphQL Foundation, lowRISC 0.6, and More

Esperanto Technologies, a company focused on developing energy-efficient many-core accelerators for artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, has announced the closure of a whopping $58 million in Series B funding – more than 10 times its previous investment rounds combined. “Despite still operating largely in stealth mode, we appreciate this… Read More

Intel Launches Myriad X Powered Neural Compute Stick 2

Intel has officially launched its Neural Compute Stick 2, a low-cost plug-and-play USB-connected deep-learning accelerator based on the company’s Movidius Myriad X vision processing unit (VPU) and boasting an eightfold performance improvement over the previous generation. Based on the same design as its predecessor, the Neural Compute Stick, Intel’s Neural… Read More

Sipeed Launches Crowdfunder for RISC-V MAIX AI Dev Boards

Chinese electronics company Sipeed has launched a crowdfunding campaign for a range of development boards based on a Kendryte K210 dual-core 64-bit RISC-V processor, aiming to bring artificial intelligence (AI) processing to edge devices and with pricing starting at $5 per board. “Sipeed MAIX is the first RV64 AI board… Read More

lowRISC 0.6 Release Brings Performance, Documentation, Ethernet Improvements

The lowRISC project has announced the release of version 0.6 of its open silicon offering, bringing improvements to performance, debugging, and network connectivity – alongside a pledge to add alternative RISC-V cores to the current Rocket option. Ten months after the release of lowRISC 0.5 brought initial support for… Read More

Hex Five, Andes, Gowin Collaborate on MultiZone Security Implementation

Hex Five Security, Andes Technology, and Gowin Semiconductor have jointly announced a collaboration which will see the former’s trusted execution environment added to the middle’s N(X)25 RISC-V cores on the latter’s GW-2A field programmable gate array (FPGA) family. “The cost of a robust security implementation on RISC-V is now negligible… Read More

The Linux Foundation Launches GraphQL Foundation

The Linux Foundation has announced the launch of a new sub-organisation, the GraphQL Foundation, to support the application programming interface (API) query language developed by Facebook and released under an open-source licence in 2015. “As one of GraphQL’s co-creators, I’ve been amazed and proud to see it grow in adoption… Read More