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.

Workshop on Open Source Design Automation (OSDA) 2020 Opens Call for Participation

The Workshop on Open Source Design Automation (OSDA), now on its second year, has announced a call for contributions with a deadline of the 12th of January 2020 – and is, as with the year before, taking place at the Conference on Design, Automation, and Test in Europe (DATE). “There… Read More

Bootlin’s Michael Opdenacker Gets You Started with Embedded Linux on RISC-V in Just 40 Minutes

Bootlin’s Michael Opdenacker has published a guide to getting started with embedded Linux on RISC-V in just 40 minutes, as part of a presentation given during the Capitole du Libre 2019 event earlier this month. Building on a presentation first given at the Libre Software Meeting 2005, in which… Read More

Wave Computing Shutters MIPS Open Programme with Immediate Effect

Wave Computing has officially shuttered its MIPS Open programme, providing “open use” to selected MIPS core IP and the underlying instruction set architecture, less than a year after the initiative was launched – and with zero advance warning. Wave Computing, which acquired the rights to the proprietary MIPS ISA and… Read More

Intel Unveils Third-Generation “Keem Bay” Movidius VPU for Edge AI

Intel’s Movidius family of vision processing units (VPUs) for artificial intelligence at the edge has a new member, codenamed Keem Bay, which promises a tenfold performance improvement over the previous generation. Brought into Intel’s stable with the acquisition of computer vision startup Movidius in 2016, the Movidius Vision Processing Unit… Read More

BSC Opens the European Laboratory for Open Computer Architecture, LOCA

The Barcelona Supercomputer Centre (BSC) has announced the opening of the European Laboratory for Open Computer Architecture (LOCA), which aims to develop both energy-efficient and high-performance chips based on open instruction set architectures (ISAs). “LOCA will be a collaborative laboratory that welcomes companies, foundations and academic institutions that share the… Read More

Observer Tacks RISC-V Cores to Sensors to Simplify Heterogeneous Aggregation

Olof Kindgren, director of the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation (FOSSi Foundation), has released a tool designed to make multi-sensor aggregation on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) simpler: the RISC-V-powered Observer. “Implementing the logic for sensor communication, post processing and format conversion directly in an FPGA can quickly become very… Read More

European Commission Publishes Final Open Source Beyond 2020 Agenda

The European Commission is to host the Open Source Beyond 2020 workshop on the future of open source hardware and software next week, featuring a panel on the advent of open source hardware and the Internet of Things chaired by the head of the Competitive Electronics Industry DG Connect A3… Read More

RISC-V Hits the Browser Courtesy of Martin Strubel’s CI Docker Image

Martin Strubel has released a guide to running a RISC-V core directly in a browser – though admits that it’s unsurprisingly not quite as performant as if it were running in a native emulator or on dedicated hardware. “I though I’d share some open source approach to let a RISC-V… Read More

CRU: Next-Gen Wishbone, FOSSi Events, and FOSSi Hits the Cloud

The maintainers of the Wishbone interconnect specification are calling for input on its future evolution, after converting the specification into an editor-friendly format for ease of participation. Offering eight, 16, 32, and 64 bit widths and originally created by the Silicore Corporation before being released under a permissive licence, the… Read More

OpenPiton+Ariane Reaches the Clouds via Amazon’s EC2 FPGAs

The free and open OpenPiton+Ariane heterogeneous research processor is now available on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) field-programmable gate arrays, providing an easy route to test it out without needing dedicated hardware. A partnership between the PULP Platform and the OpenPiton project released back in December last year, OpenPiton+Ariane… Read More

Open-Source MicroPlatform Provider Foundries.io Raises £2.7 million

Cambridge-based Foundries.io has announced £2.7 million in funding, with which it plans to accelerate its roll-out of Internet of Things (IoT) maintenance and update platform FoundriesFactory. Founded in 2017, Foundries.io launched after a stealth period of just under two years with the announcement of Linux and Zephyr real-time operating… Read More