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.

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

Xilinx Turns to Open Source for New Vitis Unified Software Platform

Xilinx has announced the launch of the Vitis development platform, designed to allow the like of software engineers and artificial intelligence (AI) scientists to take advantage of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) – and it builds on open-source software. “With exponentially increasing compute needs, engineers and scientists are often limited by… Read More

RISC-V Foundation Announces Security-Focused Soft-Core CPU Contest Winners

The RISC-V Foundation has announced the winners of its RISC-V Soft CPU Contest, launched back in July with a view to promoting security-focused RISC-V implementations. “With the proliferation of connected devices, security is one of the key challenges in hardware design. The free and open RISC-V ISA presents an… Read More

1st CLaaS and Google Summer of Code Work to “Open The Floodgates” of Free and Open Source Silicon

Redwood EDA’s Steve Hoover has written of a Google Summer of Code student who “helped open the floodgates” of free and open source silicon (FOSSi) by contributing to the 1st CLaaS framework project: Ákos Hadnagy. “While [the] open source silicon community is a hotbed of enthusiasm, it is several decades… Read More

Semiconductor Engineering Finds Open ISAs Gaining Traction in Industry

Wireless Broadband, LoRa Alliances Partner on Wi-Fi/LoRaWAN Synergy Investigation

Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) and LoRa Alliance have announced the result of an investigative partnership looking into how Internet of Things (IoT) networks can benefit from a combination of Wi-Fi and LoRaWAN connectivity. The two organisations, both of which champion differing network technologies in unlicensed spectra, collaborated on a white… Read More

Inspur Announces TF2 Open-Source Deep-Learning Engine Framework for FPGAs

High-performance computing (HPC) specialist Inspur has announced the release of TF2, a full-stack framework for efficient artificial intelligence computing on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), under the permissive Apache 2.0 licence. “The deployment of AI applications covers the cloud, the edge, and the mobile end, and has highly diverse requirements. TF2… Read More

CRU: RISC-V Momentum, Carbon Nanotubes, Fire, ICE, and More

RISC-V Foundation chief executive officer Calista Redmond has written of increasing momentum for RISC-V, as the semiconductor industry begins to shift away from proprietary closed-source core. “Interest in RISC-V has been gaining steam with commercial implementations and adoption rapidly growing. It has been incredible to witness how RISC-V has fostered… Read More

OpenPower Foundation, IBM Release Fire and ICE OMI Reference Implementations

IBM has made good on its commitment, through the OpenPOWER Foundation, to release an Open Memory Interface (OMI) under a permissive licence, with the first reference designs for its Fire OMI host and ICE two-port DDR4 OMI device hitting GitHub this month. The OpenPOWER Foundation made the surprising announcement that… Read More