News

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

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

RISC-V Foundation Launches Soft CPU Design Contest

uConfig Automates the Data Sheet to KiCAD Schematic Workflow

Developer Sébastien Caux has released a tool dubbed uConfig which aims to simplify an often-annoying part of the electronic development process: automated conversion between data sheet pin-out diagrams and KiCAD-compatible schematic symbol objects. Brought to our attention by Hackaday, Sébastien’s uConfig started life as a personal project but has… Read More

Eideticom Ports P2PDMA Offload Patches to RISC-V

Eidetic Communications’ chief technology officer Stephen Bates has announced initial support for peer-to-peer direct memory access (P2PDMA) on the RISC-V instruction set architecture, showing a 2.8GB/s throughput between controllers. Designed to address the bottleneck between high-speed PCI Express (PCIe) devices and the CPU, P2PDMA allows for data transfer to occur… Read More

CRU: FOSSi Growth Scares Arm, Verilator 4.0 Launched, and More

Storage giant Western Digital has published full instructions for building the Gnome Desktop variant of the Fedora Linux distribution for RISC-V, targeting the SiFive HiFive Unleashed development board. As part of Western Digital’s push to ship more than a billion RISC-V cores per year, as it moves away from… Read More