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.

Sam Zeloof Creates First Fully Photolithographic Homebrew IC

Engineer Sam Zeloof has become, to common knowledge, the first person to successfully create an integrated circuit using a fully photolithographic process in a home lab, building a dual differential amplifier using entirely homebrew equipment. Hobbyists around the world have been making discrete circuits at home for years, but integrated… Read More

OnChip Unveils Itsy-Chipsy Ultra-Low-Cost IC Fabrication Platform

Colombia-based OnChip has unveiled an open-source platform which aims to do for custom semiconductor creation what services like OSH Park have done for circuit boards: Itsy-Chipsy. “Chip prototyping used to be prohibitive for small start-ups and academy until services like MOSIS brought down prices to few thousands dollars per mm²… Read More

GSMA Delays eSIM Standard Over Collusion Claims

The Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA) has announced that its planned universal embedded subscriber identity module (eSIM) standard is being postponed, following the launch of an investigation by the US Department of Justice into alleged mobile network collusion designed to throw the technology off track. First introduced in… Read More

OSHCamp 2018 Schedule Finalised and Registration Opened Up

The Open Source Hardware User Group (OSHUG) has announced the schedule for OSHCamp 2018, to take place in Lincoln’s The Blue Room on the 30th of June and 1st July. Announced via a call for participation back in January, the Open Source Hardware Camp (OSHCamp) 2018 is to take… Read More

CRU: Neural Networks, Open Baseband, RISC-V, and More

It’s been a strong fortnight for machine intelligence fans, starting with Arm’s Robert Elliot and Mark O’Conner publishing a white paper on the company’s Arm NN machine learning platform and its optimisations for use on low-power embedded devices. “We expect machine learning to become a natural part of programming environments,… Read More

SeL4 Microkernel v9.0.1 Ported to RISC-V

The open-source seL4 microkernel, the first general-purpose kernel to have been proven to-spec using formal verification methods, has been ported to the open RISC-V instruction set architecture – though its creators warn it’s in a very early, limited form. Originally developed by Australia’s National Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Research… Read More

Rambus Announces RISC-V CryptoManager Security Core

Rambus has become the latest company to adopt the open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA), using its openness as the basis for a new embedded and Internet of Things (IoT) security core dubbed the CryptoManager Root of Trust. “The fundamental pillars of architectural design freedom, secure processing siloed away from… Read More

OsmocomBB Open-GSM Mobile Baseband Fernvale Port in Progress

The team behind postmarketOS has written of initial progress in porting OsmocomBB, an open GSM mobile baseband, to more modern and readily-available hardware – paving the way to a fully open GSM stack running on a mobile handset. “There is already a free software implementation of a GSM baseband called… Read More

Qualcomm Launches Vision Intelligence Platform, 10nm SoCs

Qualcomm has announced the launch of a new family of Internet of Things (IoT) focused system-on-chips (SoC) with embedded image signal processing and artificial intelligence capabilities, the first in a new range of parts for what it calls the Qualcomm Vision Intelligence Platform. “Our goal is to make IoT devices… Read More

Arm NN White Paper Points to Embedded AI Future

Arm’s Robert Elliot and Mark O’Conner have published a white paper on the company’s Arm NN machine learning platform and its optimisations for use on low-power embedded devices. “We expect machine learning to become a natural part of programming environments, with tiny embedded neural networks being part of program execution,”… Read More

Woman Using Smartphone (Bruce Mars, CC0)

CRU: Open Cellular, RISC-V Progress, Mbed LoRaWAN, and More

AB Open’s Andrew Back has published a look back at how the world of open source cellular networking has changed over the last six years, including the growth of the Osmocom project. “As exquisitely arcane as it may seem to the uninitiated, cellular infrastructure is very much within the… Read More

Debian Linux Receives Official 64-bit RISC-V Port

The Debian Linux distribution now has an official 64-bit RISC-V bootstrap in its ports infrastructure, allowing packages to be easily downloaded for use on the growing number of RISC-V devices on the market. “We’ve been working in the last few weeks to do a (second) bootstrap of Debian for RISC-V,… Read More