RISC-V pioneers OnChip and SiFive have separately announced new microcontroller chip designs, taking aim at the low-power sensor market with their own takes on the open architecture.

In a message to social networking service Twitter, OnChip revealed a RISC-V microcontroller design described as having always-on features, three power states with fine-grained power management, deep sleep, power-on reset and brown-out detector, in-house designed non-volatile memory (NV-RAM), USB 1.1 and 2.0 controllers, AES cryptography with hardware acceleration, and a small but as-yet unspecified footprint. The design, the company explains, has been released to a fabrication plant for production and will be released under an open-source hardware licence – a statement which strongly suggests the inclusion of the analogue intellectual property (IP) under the open hardware umbrella, making it one of the first chips released to not feature proprietary IP for these functions.

SiFive, meanwhile, has announced the E2 Series: the E21 mainstream microcontroller core aimed at sensor fusion, minion core, and smart Internet of Things (IoT) markets; and the E20, which it describes as its most power-efficient core yet and boasting analogue mixed signal and finite state machine suitability.

“SiFive’s Core IP is the foundation of the most widely deployed RISC-V cores in the world, and represent the lowest risk and fastest path to customized RISC-V based SoCs,” claims Yunsup Lee, co-founder and chief technical officer at SiFive. “Our Core IP Series takes advantage of the inherent scalability of RISC-V to provide a full set of customisable cores for any application – from tiny microcontrollers based on our new E2 Core IP Series to our previously announced, Linux-capable, multicore U Core IP Series.”

SiFive has also confirmed improvements to its E3 and E5 core families with coherent multicore support and a performance-boosting multiplication unit pushing the parts to a score over 3 CoreMarks per Megahertz (3CM/MHz). Details on its core offerings are available on the official website.

The team behind the OpenPiton Open Source Research Processor project has announced Release 7, bringing with it a range of improvements designed to make it easier to implement.

Built on top of the open-source OpenSPARC processor, created in 2006 when Sun Microsystems released RTL code for its UltraSPARC T1 processor, OpenPiton is a free and open-source silicon (FOSSi) project which aims to scale from a single low-power core to a 500 million count many-core implementation.

OpenPiton Release 7, announced on Twitter by the team, brings a range of improvements over earlier revisions – including a reduction in boot time, which had already been improved considerably when compared to the project’s first shipped release. Other enhancements include the ability to configure the chipset using extensible markup language (XML) and changes to make it easier to port the processor to new field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

The latest release is available to download from the official website now, while those seeking more information may be interested in our 2016 OSDDI interview with OpenPiton’s Jonathan Balkind.

Community wireless organisation The Things Network and the Digital Catapult UK technology innovation centre have announced a partnership to launch the nation’s largest free-to-use LoRaWAN wireless network.

“UK innovators can now deploy LoRaWAN solutions more seamlessly across the region and fuel further collaboration to benefit the UK economy,” claims The Things Network initiator Wienke Giezeman of the partnership. “Companies too will also be able to demonstrate their services globally, with The Things Network nodes available across the six continents.”

“LPWAN connectivity will be the driving force behind the uptake of IoT,” adds Digital Catapult’s head of product innovation Peter Karney, “bringing new companies and services to market. This partnership enables us to expand and accelerate UK innovation.”

The partnership will see The Things Network merged with Digital Catapult’s Things Connected network, launched in 2016, to create a combined LoRaWAN network with 400 base stations including the Things Connected networks in London, the North East region, and Northern Ireland and 63 local The Things Network communities.

AB has previously worked with the Digital Catapult on a LoRaWAN programme for Calderdale businesses and entrepreneurs, and currently operates four LoRaWAN gateways connected to the Things Network providing a completely free-to-use data service, as part of the Things Calderdale initiative.

Those looking to connect to The Things Network will be interested in a crowdfunding campaign for a low-cost USB-connected LoRa transceiver launched this week by Steven Osborn, of Oregon-based Third Venture Inc: the LoRa Stik.

“In 2013 I worked on a solution for vineyard owners to monitor wine grapes. Back then we were using expensive and not very robust xBee radios and had poor tools for testing network health. It was pretty challenging and frustrating,” Steven explains of his inspiration for the project. “Over the past two years I’ve been working with LoRa devices and designed LoRa Stik for my own needs. LoRa technology along with LoRa Stik have made my life a lot simpler. I’ve made a lot of small improvements to LoRa Stik over recent months; it has been a valuable tool for me and I think it is finally time for me to share it with everyone.”

Designed for use with any computer or microcontroller capable of acting as a USB Host and featuring an ASCII interface, the LoRa Stick can be used in both packet and LoRaWAN modes – making it compatible with The Things Network – and is released under an unspecified open source licence. It is claimed to offer 140mA transmission and 20mA idle power draw and a 15km suburban and 5km urban coverage area.

The LoRa Stik is available to pre-order now via Crowd Supply, priced at $39 plus shipping and tax, while hardware and software sources are available on the project’s GitHub repository.

CEA Tech research institute Leti, meanwhile, has announced a new low-power wide-area (LPWA) standard, based on a novel approach to the physical layer called Turbo Frequency-Shift Keying (Turbo-FSK), which it claims outperforms both LoRa and NB-IoT implementations.

“Leti’s Turbo-FSK receiver performs close to the Shannon limit, which is the maximum rate that data can be transmitted over a given noisy channel without error, and is geared for low spectral efficiency,” claims Leti’s Vincent Berg in a press release republished by Solid State Technology. “Moreover, the waveform exhibits a constant envelope – i.e. it has a peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR) equal to 0dB, which is especially beneficial for power consumption. Turbo-FSK is therefore well adapted to future LPWA systems, especially in 5G cellular systems.”

According to the company’s field-trial testing of what it is calling LPWA-CB, its LPWA implementation successfully scales its data rate from 3Mb/s down to 4Kb/s depending on conditions, switching between single-carrier frequency-division multiplexing (SC-FDM), orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), and Turbo-FSK as required automatically and invisibly to the user.

More details on Turbo-FSK technology are available in this 2016 open-access research paper.

Regardless of the technology used for the network itself, researchers at Brunel University London have announced a novel architecture for software defined networks (SDN), dubbed Open-Level Control (OLC), which they claim will help networks deal with the growing volume of messaging from Internet of Things (IoT) devices over the coming decades.

“We believe we have developed the best discovery architecture because it combines both distributed and centralised architectures,” claims Professor Hamed Al-Raweshidy, who worked on the project alongside Emad Alsadi, in a press release republished by PhysOrg. “This introduces an open-level distributed–centralised control plane architecture in an SDN network.”

According to internal testing in a 22-system network, an implementation of OLC – which works by scaling control and data plans separately – saw the number of discovery packets being broadcast in the data plane reduced by 84.2 percent, discovery time reduced by 55.2%, and scales to 3.2 times as many subnets as a rival distributed architecture.

“In [the] future, we plan to connect OLC to the Internet to check its validity for dealing with real everyday traffic,” says Professor Al-Raweshidy. “We also aim to implement a core network prototype using the OLC architecture and test it across several virtual campus networks.”

The pair’s paper, OLC; Open-Level Control Plane Architecture for Providing Better Scalability in an SDN Network, is available under open access in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

ON Semiconductor has announced the launch of the Internet of Things (IoT) Development Kit (IDK), a development board ecosystem designed to make prototyping and test as rapid as possible.

“ON Semiconductor recognised early on that something needed to be done about the disjointed situation that exists between the hardware and software aspects of IoT/IIoT [Internet of Things/Industrial Internet of Things] development,” ON Semi’s Cole Sikes explains in a piece introducing the project over on RS DesignSpark. “Its technical staff were given the job of attempting to bridge this gap − bringing a solution to market that covered both distinctive types of competency. The result of this endeavour was the ON Semiconductor IoT Development Kit (IDK).

“The IDK presents engineers with a ready-to-use single platform that exhibits a high degree of flexibility, upon which the demands of both hardware and software are fully accommodated. Based on the company’s highly sophisticated NCS36510 system-on-chip (SoC) with a 32-bit Arm Cortex M3 processor core, it has all the necessary hardware resources for constructing highly effective, differentiated IoT systems, along with a comprehensive software framework to attend to interfacing with the cloud. By attaching different shields to the IDK baseboard, a wealth of connectivity (Wi-Fi, SIGFOX, Ethernet, ZigBee and Thread protocols, etc.), sensor (motion, ambient light, proximity, heart rate, etc.) and actuator (with stepper and brushless motor driving, plus the ability to drive LED strings) options can be added to the system. This means that compromises do not have to be made, and the most suitable technology can be chosen.”

Current modules in the IDK ecosystem include the Base Board host plus evaluation boards for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Bluetooth 5, SIGFOX, Power-over-Ethernet (PoE), CAN-bus, passive infra-red sensing, touch sensing, multiple motor types, and dual LED ballast operation. More information is available on RS DesignSpark.

Finally, footage from the Wuthering Bytes 2017 Festival Day and OSHCamp 2017 events has been uploaded to the AB Open channel on YouTube.

Footage from the Wuthering Bytes 2017 Festival Day includes:

  • Build communities, not products — Ian Drysdale
  • Balancing the very hot and the very cold – how do you keep something “just right” in space? Katie Hassell
  • Off-grid Interactive Non-Fiction, Ross Dalziel
  • A Hack A Day, Even When It’s Raining — Jenny List
  • The Charmed Life of the Harwell Dekatron Computer — Kevin Murrell
  • The Secrets of Particle Accelerators — Dr Suzie Sheehy
  • Groping our way towards ‘Computer Literacy’ — David Allen

These, along with Dr David Hartley and Caroline Gorksi’s talks, have been made available via the Wuthering Bytes 2017 playlist.

Unfortunately, there was a problem with the audio from James Larsson’s talk, 15 Years a Dork.

AB Open’s Andrew Back, one of the event’s organisers and creators, has again expressed his thanks to the fantastic Festival Day speakers, all the participating events and their speakers — and, of course, 2017 festival sponsors, Co-op Digital, Fourth Day Public Relations, Calderdale Council, Code Mill, and Bytemark!

Footage from the OSHCamp 2017 event, the annual gathering of Open Source Hardware User Group (OSHUG) members and other interested parties and held that year as part of the broader Wuthering Bytes 2017 event, includes:

  • An Introduction to RISC-V by Dr. Graham Markall
  • AI and ML for Embedded Systems by Alan Wood
  • Some BBC micro:bit Stories by Lawrence Archard
  • Robot Operating System by Nick Weldin
  • So You Decided to Run a Workshop? by Sevan Janiyan
  • BuggyAir for Mobile Personal Pollution Exposure Monitoring by Paul Tanner
  • Computer Science from the Ground Up by Ken Boak
  • From Project to Kit by Jenny List
  • Open-Source Instrumentation with the Digilent OpenScope MZ by Ioan Catuna
  • Conservatory and Garden Automation by Rod Moody

The OSHCamp 2017 playlist is available on YouTube now, joining our other videos.