News

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

Lime Micro Working on RISC-V LimeNET Base Station

Lime Microsystems are working with SiFive to build an open wireless base station featuring the former’s field-programmable radio frequency (FPRF) IC and the latter’s RISC-V processor technology. Building on the existing LimeNET platform, which pairs the open LimeSDR software defined radio with x86 host hardware, the prototype design replaces the… Read More

Linux Foundation Launches IoT-Focused ACRN Hypervisor

The Linux Foundation has announced the ACRN (pronounced “Acorn”) Project, an effort to develop a reference hypervisor for the Internet of Things (IoT) in the face of existing solutions being too bulky and unwieldy for embedded use. “With project ACRN, embedded developers have a new, immediately available hypervisor option,” claims… Read More

Ground Electronics Unveils the Circumference Pi Cluster

Ground Electronics, AB Open’s manufacturing division, today unveils a new “datacentre-in-a-box” platform targeting software development, testing, and education: the Raspberry Pi-powered Circumference. Presented to the public for the first time today ahead of a crowdfunding campaign launch in the coming weeks, Circumference is designed to offer all the functionality of… Read More

OSDDI: Dr Jeremy Bennett, Embecosm

In the latest episode of Open Source Digital Design Insights we hear from Dr Jeremy Bennett, CEO of Embecosm, on the numerous motivations for open source silicon, its already modestly successful if largely unknown history, through LEON and OpenRISC ASIC manufacture, Embecosm’s own work on the… Read More

A Look at the New Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has today launched the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, a revision to its popular single-board computer (SBC) which brings with it a faster and cooler-running processor, gigabit Ethernet and 5GHz Wi-Fi connectivity, and support for Power over Ethernet (PoE). Launched six years after the first Raspberry… Read More

Mike Wishart Calls for “Open Innovation” in the IoT

Mike Wishart, chief executive officer at electronics crowdsourcing platform efabless, has issued a call for a move beyond open source software and into the realm of “open innovation.” “Embedded open source software not only works; most our world runs on it today,” Mike writes in the introduction of an… Read More

LibreCores launches El Correo Libre Newsletter

LibreCores launch newsletter for the free and open source silicon community, with news on everything from personal projects, through to research and industry developments. The inaugural edition of the El Correo Libre newsletter was published today and features news items on Google Summer of Code 2018, TinyFPGA, the 4th generation… Read More

CRU: Security, Open Consumer Products, Solderpad Hardware Licence 2.0, and More

GreenWaves Technologies has officially launched GAP8, its RISC-V based low-power application processor for Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Based on the work of the Parallel Ultra Low Power (PULP) project, GAP8 was first shown off as a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) core back in March… Read More

RISC-V’s Potential Highlighted in Low Start-up Costs

The benefit of an open instruction set architecture (ISA) like RISC-V have been laid bare in a piece by Stacey Higginbotham which puts the real-world cost of launching your own RISC-V semiconductor company below the cost of simply licensing proprietary intellectual property (IP) from a company like Arm. Following… Read More

Bunnie Huang Makes Case for Open Hardware Consumer Products

Slowing of Moore’s law, virtuous feedback cycle and ecosystem benefits cited among the motivations for making consumer products with designs that anyone can study and modify. In a Business Impact interview for MIT Technology Review Andrew “Bunnie” Huang makes the case for hackable consumer products, noting how “The slowing… Read More

UK Government Publishes “Secure by Design” IoT Policy

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport of the UK Government has published a policy paper on the development and sale of Internet of Things (IoT) devices from a security perspective, dubbed “Secure by Design.” “We want everyone to benefit from the huge potential of internet-connected devices and it… Read More

Solderpad Hardware Licence Gets New Release

Version 2.0 release of Solderpad Hardware Licence is simplified and presented as a wraparound to the Apache 2.0 software license. The Solderpad Hardware Licence is based upon the popular Apache 2.0 software license, which in contrast to simpler permissive software licences such as BSD and MIT, provides greater clarity… Read More