Category: Community

Get the latest news on developments in the wider community and topics including wireless, embedded and open source silicon.

SiFive Launches New E7, S7, U7 RISC-V Cores

RISC-V pioneer SiFive has announced a new family of processor cores, the Core IP 7 Series, which it claims are “the highest performance commercially available RISC-V cores” and which come in hard-real-time, performance, and Linux-capable variants. “The SiFive Core IP 7 Series represents a major advancement in RISC-V. The 7… Read More

TechInsights Compares LPWAN Standards via Die Analysis

TechInsights’ Jefferson Chua and Daniel Yang have published a comparative piece looking at the four main low-power wide-area networking (LPWAN) technologies currently vying for the Internet of Things (IoT): LoRa, Sigfox, NB-IoT, and LTE-M. In the piece, published on Electronic Design, the pair compare the four primary LPWAN standards currently… Read More

SHAKTI Project Team, Courtesy of Silicon India

SHAKTI Project Boots Linux on Home-Grown 180nm RISC-V Silicon

The IIT Madras SHAKTI Project has celebrated a major milestone this month: the first boot of a RISC-V processor both designed and manufactured within its native India. Launched in 2014 with a focus on IBM’s Power instruction set architecture (ISA) before switching to the open-source RISC-V ISA, the Shakti Project… Read More

S3 Semi’s Edel Griffith Busts Custom Silicon Myths

S3 Semiconductors’ Edel Griffith has published a piece on Electronic Design busting 11 myths about custom silicon, from production of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) being too expensive for lower-volume projects and fear of a so-called “black-box design” process. Designed to encourage companies to look more closely at custom… Read More

OpenStack Foundation Issues First StarlingX Edge Computing Release

The OpenStack Foundation, in partnership with Wind River and Intel, has released a new open-source edge computing platform aimed at, among others, low-latency Internet of Things (IoT) applications: StarlingX. “When it comes to edge, it is crucial to be able to blend together and manage all the virtual machine and… Read More

Zimperium Warns of Critical FreeRTOS Vulnerabilities

Security researcher Ori Karliner, of Zimperium’s zLabs, has warned of a range of vulnerabilities in the popular open-source FreeRTOS real-time operating system kernel – and with remote code execution possible, developers using the platform are urged to patch. Made available under the MIT Licence, FreeRTOS supports a wide range of… Read More

CRU: RISC-V Design Contest, Radio Spectrum Harmisation, Mbed Linux, and More

The RISC-V Foundation has announced the launch of a design contest, in partnership with Google, Antmicro, and Microchip, which will see entrants competing to build the smallest and fastest RISC-V soft core implementations on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). One of the biggest benefits of free and open source silicon (FOSSi)… Read More

DeepMind Releases Open-Source TRFL Reinforcement Learning Library

British artificial intelligence specialist DeepMind Technologies, acquired by Google parent company Alphabet in 2014, has announced the release of a library of building blocks for reinforcement learning in machine intelligence: TRFL. The TRFL library, pronounced “truffle”, is described by the company as “a collection of key algorithmic components that we… Read More

Clifford Wolf launches Yosys Open Synthesis Suite 0.8

Developer Clifford Wolf has announced the release of Yosys 0.8, the latest version of the popular open synthesis suite framework, bringing with it a range of new improvements and bug fixes. Designed to ease register-transfer level (RTL) development, analysis, and formal verification for projects written in the Verilog hardware description… Read More

Arm Announces Mbed Linux OS for Cortex-A Parts

Arm’s Mbed division has announced a new operating system to sit alongside its existing Mbed OS: Mbed Linux OS, based on the Linux kernel and tools from the Yocto Project. “My goal has been to extend the benefits of Mbed OS to IoT products that use Cortex-A silicon,” explains Arm’s… Read More

European Commission Harmonises Radio Spectrum for Short-Range IoT, RFID Projects

The European Commission has announced a plan to harmonise the radio spectrum allocations for short-range devices in a pair of popular frequency bands, to help support Internet of Things (IoT) project development and deployment. Adopted as what is known as an “Implementing Decision,” the European Commission’s plan will see additional… Read More

Microsemi CreativeBoard FPGA development board