News

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

Fadu Announces World’s First RISC-V SSD, Controller

Fadu, a fabless semiconductor company specialising in the memory and storage markets, has announced the launch of the world’s first RISC-V based solid state drive (SSD) controller, the Annapurna, based on SiFive’s E51 multi-core IP. Beating Western Digital, which announced its own plans to switch from proprietary instruction set architectures… Read More

Disclose.io Aims to Protect Security Researchers

A group of developers, lawyers, and security researchers have joined forces to launch disclose.io, an effort to produce a standardised framework for security disclosures which provide protections for good-faith researchers and the companies whose products they analyse. The field of security research can be a lucrative one: many companies offers… Read More

LoRa Alliance Releases LoRaWAN 1.0.3 Specification

The LoRa Alliance has announced an update to the LoRaWAN 1.0.3 specification for low-power wide-area wireless networks, adding unicast and multicast support to Class B devices and new time synchronisation features for other classes. In its latest update to the open LoRaWAN low-power wide-area network standard, proving popular globally for… Read More

China’s Tencent Joins LoRa Alliance, Plans Shenzhen LoRaWAN Launch

Chinese technology giant Tencent has announced its membership of the LoRa Alliance, as part of a plan to launch a LoRaWAN-based Internet of Things (IoT) network in the bustling city of Shenzhen. “It is clear that LPWANs [low-power wide area networks] are essential for IoT technology and applications, and the… Read More

RISC-V Architecture SHAKTI Test Chip Boots Linux

IIT Madras partner with Intel Corporation and HCL Technologies to create I/O packed microcontroller test chip in 22nm FinFET that takes aim at ARM Cortex A35/A55. In a presentation at the RISC-V workshop hosted at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras in July, researchers shared details of a… Read More

Silicon Dreams: RISC-V from Emulation to FPGA to ASIC

When working with brand-new silicon designs, particularly free and open source silicon, there’s a bit of a bootstrapping issue: you want to write software for the new silicon, but there’s no silicon yet available; nobody wants to go to the expense of making the silicon, meanwhile, when there’s no software… Read More

CRU: ORConf 2018, Quantum Education, KiCad 5.0, and More

An initial programme for ORConf 2018, the open-source digital design conference to be held in Gdansk, Poland this September, has been published – and there are some big names showing off the state of the art on the schedule. While there are more speakers yet to be announced, the initial… Read More

Google Announces Edge TPU Deep-Learning Accelerator Hardware

Google has announced plans to release a hardware product, dubbed Edge TPU, to bring its TensorFlow-accelerating Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) technology to the Internet of Things. Originally announced back in May 2016 as an internal project to accelerate the company’s search, translation, and other services, the Tensor Processing Unit is… Read More

RISC-V Foundation’s SSC Calls on Big Data, Defence Companies

RISC-V Foundation director Ted Speers has offered up more details on the organisations he would like to see involved in the recently-announced Security Standing Committee. Announced earlier this month by executive director Rick O’Connor, the RISC-V Foundation’s Security Standing Committee came with a request: “[A] call to action for… Read More

Initial ORConf 2018 Programme Published

IBM, Microsoft Release Quantum Computing Education Materials

IBM and Microsoft have begun efforts to develop the next generation of programming talent for the impending era of quantum computing, focusing on gamified core concepts and practical programming katas respectively. Unlike traditional computers, which – with some notable exceptions – use binary bits with an on-off state, quantum computers… Read More

Bootlin Announces Allwinner VPU Driver Completion

Bootlin has announced the delivery of all the main goals from its crowdfunding project to create an upstream-compatible open driver for the popular Allwinner visual processing unit (VPU) hardware found in many embedded designs. Funded via Kickstarter, the campaign by Bootlin engineer Maxime Ripard and intern Paul Kocialkowski saw… Read More