News

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

Linux 4.15 Hit by Last-Minute Delay

Linux kernel maintainer Linus Torvalds has announced a last-minute delay to the release of Linux 4.15, marking the first time a kernel version has needed a ninth release candidate since 2011. “I really really wanted to just release 4.15 today, but things haven’t calmed down enough for me to feel… Read More

FOSSi Foundation Opens Call for Google Summer of Code Projects

The Free and Open Source Silicon (FOSSi) Foundation has announced a call for proposals as part of its application to the Google Summer of Code event, which has previously borne fruit including the recreation of a classic computer on modern hardware. An educational initiative run by advertising giant Google each… Read More

LowRISC 0.5 Brings First Ethernet Support

The lowRISC project has officially announced the launch of lowRISC 0.5, a milestone release of the popular RISC-V implementation which brings with it open-source Ethernet support. Built upon a RISC-V implementation from the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley), lowRISC 0.5 marks a major milestone release on the… Read More

CRU: RISC-V, LoRa, Movidius, and More

The rise of low-power long-range radio technologies like LoRaWAN has been a boon for the Internet of Things (IoT), but working in radio brings unique challenges – as demonstrated by Embedded.com’s new guide to optimising the performance of embedded radios. Written by Chris Lamb and Rod Williams, the guide… Read More

University of Manchester Graphene Sensor

Researchers Demonstrate Energy-Harvesting Graphene Sensors

Researchers at the University of Manchester have announced graphene-based battery-free sensors which they claim could revolutionise the Internet of Things (IoT). Using graphene, a layer of carbon one atom thick and which is being hailed as the wonder-material of the future for a range of technologies, in graphene-oxide form, a… Read More

Future Ships Avalanche FPGA Dev Board with RISC-V Core

Future Electronics has announced the launch of the Avalanche development board, powered by Microsemi’s PolarFire field programmable gate array (FPGA) and shipping with a pre-loaded RISC-V CPU core. “The Avalanche board is the newest addition to our family of development boards. Avalanche is the lowest cost board available in the… Read More

Intel Movidius Myriad 2 VPU Chip Hits the Skies

Intel’s innovative Myriad 2 vision processing unit (VPU) has found its way into the drone market through a partnership between start-up Ryze Tech, Intel, and drone specialist DJI. Designed to offer ease of flight and remote photography with smartphone control, the Ryze Tello is described by the company as a… Read More

Semtech Announces Next-Gen LoRa Chips

Analogue and mixed-signal semiconductor specialist Semtech has announced next-generation chips for LoRa radio devices with a claimed 50 percent reduction in power draw, 20 percent boost in range, and 45 percent reduction in component footprint. Designed for devices using the LoRaWAN long-range low-power wide area network protocol, Semtech’s new SX1226,… Read More

OSDDI: Elkim Roa, OnChip UIS

A modern microntroller or system-on-chip is much more than simply a processor and some digital peripherals, typically integrating a selection of analogue IP also. In this latest episode of Open Source Digital Design Insights we speak with Professor Elkim Roa, Head of the OnChip Group at UIS Colombia, who… Read More

Arm Releases Low-Resource, High-Resiliency LittleFS

Arm’s MBED division has announced the release of LittleFS, a file system designed to offer high-integrity storage for embedded devices with minimal RAM and flash usage. Built into Mbed OS 5.7 as an alternative to the classic File Allocation Table (FAT) file system, LittleFS is designed to reduce resource usage… Read More

Esperanto Announces 4,112-Core RISC-V AI Chip

Esperanto, a company run by The Case for RISC co-authors Dave Ditzel and Dave Patterson, has announced its first RISC-V products – including a 4,112-core processor aimed at high-performance artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Detailed in full on WikiChip Fuse, Esperanto’s aim is to produce three intellectual property (IP) core… Read More

Get Hands-on with Deep Learning at Intel Movidius NCS Workshop

On 22nd February Intel, OSHUG and BCS OSSG will host a 1-day workshop in London that provides an introduction to deploying deep neural networks with the Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick. Open source frameworks such as Caffe and TensorFlow expedite the development of deep learning applications, and with… Read More