News

The latest on developments at AB Open and across the wider community.

The Things Network, Servet Balloon Launch 2019

The Things Network Sets New LoRaWAN Transmission Record

The Things Network, the community-driven LoRaWAN project, has announced a world record successful transmission distance from the Servet project: 476 miles, or 766 kilometres. Designed for low power yet wide area use, LoRaWAN is the technology behind community-driven wide-area networking project The Things Network – the largest open LoRaWAN network… Read More

Alibaba Unveils High-Performance 16-Core 2.5GHz RISC-V Chip Design

Alibaba, via the Pingtouge (T-Head) division of its DAMO Academy, has announced what it claims is the world’s most powerful processor based on the open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA): a 16-core 2.5GHz design built on a 12nm process node, dubbed the CoreXuanTie910 or XT910. “The breakthrough is more than… Read More

CRU: RISC-V Soft-Core Contest, Wuthering Bytes Programme, Plan 9 for Raspberry Pi, and More

The RISC-V Foundation, in partnership with Microchip Technology and Thales, has announced its second soft-core CPU competition – time time focusing on security. Following on from its first soft-core CPU contest late last year, the RISC-V Foundation has announced its second. Where the first focused on performance and smart… Read More

PULP Platform Tapes Out Urania Heterogeneous RISC-V ASIC

The Parallel Ultra-Low Power (PULP) Platform project has announced tape-out of Urania, an implementation of its bigPULP design which combines one Ariane core with two quad-core RISC-V clusters. Announced back in February last year, Ariane is a 64-bit application-class RISC-V core design, created as a joint effort between ETH… Read More

Microchip Shows Off Rad-Hardened RISC-V for Low-Cost Satellites

Microchip’s Dorian Johnson has penned a piece on the open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA)’s ascent into space, courtesy of radiation-hardened implementations from his company. “Using the new open RISC-V architecture, the FPGA circuitry can operate advantageously close to a remote measurement source,” Johnson explains in the piece for Elektroniikkalehti. Read More

Pepijn de Vos's 7400-series Breathing Circuit

Pepijn de Vos’ 74-Series Project Goes Straight from VHDL to PCB

Engineer Pepijn de Vos has released the source code and video demonstration for a five-chip 74-series logic gate ‘breathing LED circuit’ – without ever having had to manually design the printed circuit board. “I had been keeping an eye on Yosys, the open source HDL synthesis tool, which can apparently… Read More

Plan 9 from Bell Labs Gets Early Support for the Raspberry Pi 4

An effort to port the Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system to the Raspberry Pi family of low-cost single-board computers has received initial support for the new Raspberry Pi 4 – though there’s still work to do on the project. First released in 1992 for academic users and 1995… Read More

OpenPiton’s JuxtaPiton Processor to get Open-Source i486 Core

Kunal Gulati, working with the OpenPiton Project’s Jonathan Balkind and Katie Lim under the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation (FOSSi) Google Summer of Code, has announced a project to expand the JuxtaPiton heterogeneous research processor with a third core: ao486. Announced back in November 2018, JuxtaPiton is the… Read More

Microsemi CreativeBoard FPGA development board

RISC-V Foundation Launches Security-Focused Soft-Core CPU Contest

2019 Wuthering Bytes Festival Day Programme Finalised

The programme for the Wuthering Bytes Festival Day, which headlines a 10 day long celebration of technology in picturesque Hebden Bridge, has now been finalised ahead of its opening on Friday the 30th of August 2019. Since its inception in 2013, Wuthering Bytes has attracted a top-quality collection of technologists,… Read More

Shakti RISC-V Processor Project Releases Public Software Development Kit

The Shakti Processor Project, which has produced India’s first natively-manufactured processor, has publicly released the Shakti Software Development Kit (SDK) – meaning application development for the RISC-V based chips can now begin. Featured in one of AB Open’s Open Source Digital Design Insights (OSDDI) interviews, the Shakti Processor Project… Read More

FOSSi Foundation Announces ORConf Three-Month Countdown

The Free and Open Source Silicon (FOSSi) Foundation has announced the three-month countdown to ORConf, the conference for anyone interested in open-source silicon and the tool chains behind it. “ORConf is in its 8th year of bringing the open source silicon community together for a weekend of presentations, ideas and… Read More