News

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

CRU: Events, HiFive Unleashed, Open ASIC Design and More

The Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation has announced that ORConf 2018 will be held over the weekend of September 21st to 23rd in Gdansk, Poland. Now in its seventh year, ORConf is a free-to-attend conference for open source digital, semiconductor, and embedded systems design engineers. What started… Read More

Mozilla Launches Things Gateway IoT Platform

Mozilla, the organisation behind popular open-source browser Firefox, has announced the release of a stable build of its Things Gateway, promoting its Internet-of-Things (IoT) focused Project Things initiative from a ‘hack’ to a launched – though early-stage – product. Originally unveiled as a prototype back in June 2017 under… Read More

Open Source Software Compliance in the Supply Chain Event (London, 22/03)

On Thursday 22nd March the BCS Open Source Specialist Group and Open Source Hardware User Group will host a free-to-attend event dedicated to the topic of open source software compliance in the supply chain. The ever increasing complexity of embedded device software stacks, coupled with the proliferation of new mechanisms… Read More

Bunnie Huang on Open-Source, Low-Cost ASIC Design

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has published an interview with noted engineer Andrew ‘Bunnie’ Huang on the topic of how small teams can design custom silicon in a constrained budget. “FPGAs [Field Programmable Gate Arrays] waste a large amount of silicon compared with an ASIC [Application… Read More

Bootlin Launches Allwinner VPU Linux Mainline Campaign

Bootlin, formerly known as Free Electrons, has launched a crowdfunding campaign to provide support for the Allwinner Video Processing Unit (VPU) in the mainline Linux kernel, for out-of-the-box hardware accelerated video decoding and encoding. Found in many of Allwinner’s Arm-based system-on-chip (SoC) designs for embedded and low-power platforms, the… Read More

Multi-core 64-bit Linux-capable RISC-V Board Unveiled and Available to Pre-order

HiFive Unleashed demonstrated at FOSDEM 2018 running Linux, presentation software and a Quake port, with first boards to ship in around 8 weeks time. In a presentation entitled, Igniting the Open Hardware Ecosystem with RISC-V, we first heard from SiFive’s Palmer Dabbelt, who provided a background to… Read More

Busting the RISC-V ISA Myths

Electronic Design is continuing its 11 Myths series, which covered LoRaWAN last month, with a look at the RISC-V open instruction set architecture (ISA). “Many companies today are exploring free, open-source hardware and software as an alternative to closed, costly instruction set architectures (ISAs). RISC-V is a free, open,… Read More

ORConf 2018 Announced

The Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation has announced that ORConf 2018 will be held over the weekend of September 21st to 23rd in Gdansk, Poland. Now in its seventh year, ORConf is a free to attend conference for open source digital, semiconductor and embedded systems design engineers. Read More

CRU: OSHCamp 2018, OpenPiton, LoRaWAN and More

The Open Source Hardware Camp 2018 is set to take place in Lincoln on the 30th of June and 1st of July, and the call for talks and workshops is now open. While the event has an overall theme of, naturally, open source hardware, there is no overriding topic list… Read More

Electronic Design Demystifies LoRaWAN

Electronic Design has put together a guide designed to demystify LoRaWAN, the increasingly widespread open-standard long-range low-power wireless area network technology. Written to address eleven common misconceptions or confusions surrounding the technology, ranging from confusion between the physical LoRa layer and the LoRaWAN protocol which sits on top of… Read More

OSDDI: Jonathan Balkind, OpenPiton

Back in 2006 Sun Microsystems made the bold move of open sourcing the RTL code for their UltraSPARC T1 processor via the OpenSPARC project. Targeted at data centre applications and with a full configuration featuring 8x cores and 32x hardware threads, the processor was used in Sun and Fujitsu systems,… Read More

Open Source Hardware Camp 2018 call for Talks & Workshops

This year’s Open Source Hardware Camp will be hosted at The Blue Room in the historic county town of Lincoln, over the weekend of Sat 30th June & Sun 1st July. Lincoln is home to, amongst others, noted engine builders Ruston & Hornsby — now Siemens, via GEC and English… Read More