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.

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

Wishbone Interconnect Maintainers Seek Input on Next-Generation Evolution

FOSDEM 2020 RISC-V Devroom Opens Call for Participation

The organisers of the RISC-V Devroom at the FOSDEM 2020 conference, taking place in Brussels this coming February, have opened the call for talk proposals. “FOSDEM 2020 will take place on February 1-2, 2020 in Brussels, Belgium. There will be a half day RISC-V developer’s room on February 1st (Saturday),”… Read More

RISC-V Foundation Announces RISC-V Summit 2019 Agenda

The RISC-V Foundation has announced the agenda for its second annual RISC-V summit, taking place this December in San Jose, California. “The RISC-V Foundation, in partnership with Informa’s Tech Division, is hosting its annual RISC-V Summit, a four-day conference featuring keynotes, smaller breakout sessions, tutorials, exhibitions and networking receptions, as… Read More

VSDOpen 2019 Online Conference Scheduled for Saturday 19th October

VLSI System Design (VSD) has announced VSDOpen 2019, its second annual online conference for the semiconductor industry – with a focus on open-source electronics design automation (EDA) and the RISC-V instruction set architecture. Following the success of VSDOpen 2018, VLSI System Design has scheduled its second annual online conference –… Read More

CHIPS Alliance Announces Two-Day Open-Source Design Verification Workshop

CHIPS Alliance has opened registration for a two-day open-source design verification workshop, taking place on the 14th and 15th of November in Munich, Germany. Launched back in March, CHIPS Alliance is a Linux Foundation project focused on supporting the burgeoning free and open source silicon (FOSSi) movement. Its first… Read More

The Economist Switches On to the Potential of Free and Open Source Silicon

The free and open source silicon movement is continuing to capture mainstream interest, with The Economist becoming the latest publication to examine the impact the movement is having both generally and in specific cases. There’s a temptation to view free and open source silicon purely in terms of economic value… Read More

CRU: New Open Silicon Releases, Xilinx’ Vitis, and More

Semiconductor Engineering’s Ann Steffora Mutschler has highlighted the growing popularity of open instruction set architectures (ISAs) like RISC-V and the newly-opened Power ISA, in a piece with input from a range of industry experts. “It’s become so cumbersome to go into building chips because of all these factors,” OpenPOWER processor… Read More