Tag: FOSS

Get the latest news on developments in the wider community and topics including wireless, embedded and open source silicon.

CRU: RISC-V Soft-Core Contest, Wuthering Bytes Programme, Plan 9 for Raspberry Pi, and More

The RISC-V Foundation, in partnership with Microchip Technology and Thales, has announced its second soft-core CPU competition – time time focusing on security. Following on from its first soft-core CPU contest late last year, the RISC-V Foundation has announced its second. Where the first focused on performance and smart… Read More

Pepijn de Vos's 7400-series Breathing Circuit

Pepijn de Vos’ 74-Series Project Goes Straight from VHDL to PCB

Engineer Pepijn de Vos has released the source code and video demonstration for a five-chip 74-series logic gate ‘breathing LED circuit’ – without ever having had to manually design the printed circuit board. “I had been keeping an eye on Yosys, the open source HDL synthesis tool, which can apparently… Read More

Plan 9 from Bell Labs Gets Early Support for the Raspberry Pi 4

An effort to port the Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system to the Raspberry Pi family of low-cost single-board computers has received initial support for the new Raspberry Pi 4 – though there’s still work to do on the project. First released in 1992 for academic users and 1995… Read More

Shakti RISC-V Processor Project Releases Public Software Development Kit

The Shakti Processor Project, which has produced India’s first natively-manufactured processor, has publicly released the Shakti Software Development Kit (SDK) – meaning application development for the RISC-V based chips can now begin. Featured in one of AB Open’s Open Source Digital Design Insights (OSDDI) interviews, the Shakti Processor Project… Read More

OpenROAD Project Accepting Nominations for Open-Source Community Contribution Awards

The OpenROAD project, the University of California at San Diego’s initiative to reduce the cost, expertise, and risk barriers to hardware design through open-source, has opened nominations for Open-Source Community Contribution Awards. “The OpenROAD project is pleased to announce the establishment of its Open-Source Community Contribution Awards,” the organisation explains… Read More

CRU: Digital FOSSils, RISC-V Growth, Embench Benchmark, and More

AB Open’s Open Source Digital Design Insights (OSDDI) series has expanded with the launch of its first long-form article: Digital FOSSils, a look at the storied history of the free and open-source silicon movement. Today, while the term “free and open source silicon” might not be heard around every water… Read More

Semi Engineering Highlights Growing Industry Interest in Open-Source EDA

Semiconductor Engineering’s Kevin Fogarty has penned a piece on the industry’s increasing interest in open-source electronic design automation (EDA) tools, thanks in no small part to the growth of open hardware projects including RISC-V. “Open-source EDA is back on the semiconductor industry’s agenda, spurred by growing interest in open-source hardware,”… Read More

Digital FOSSils: A History of Free and Open Source Silicon

Today, while the term “free and open source silicon” might not be heard around every water cooler, it’s certainly becoming more common. Projects like RISC-V, which aim to create instruction set architectures which can be used in processors from ultra-low-power microcontrollers all the way up to many-core high-performance computing products,… Read More

Western Digital Partners with SiFive, PlatformIO for Extended Open-Source Dev Toolset

Western Digital has announced a partnership with SiFive and PlatformIO Labs which will see the latter’s embedded development platform extended in order to provide a vendor-agnostic, end-to-end open environment with full RISC-V support. Western Digital’s interest in embedded development in general and the open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) specifically… Read More

Work Continues on Debian Linux RISC-V Port, Documentation Efforts

The Debian Linux distribution’s Manuel Montezelo has written of the progress in porting the distribution to the 64-bit RISC-V architecture, boasting of around a 90 percent package compatibility milestone. Announced back in April 2018, the Debian Linux RISC-V port had a long road ahead of it. At launch, around… Read More

X-FAB, Efabless Announces RISC-V-Based Raven Mixed-Signal SoC

X-FAB Silicon Foundries and Efabless Corporation have announced the creation of a new mixed-signal system-on-chip (SoC) reference design boasting a RISC-V core: Raven. Designed, its creators claim, in just three months, the open-source mixed-signal Raven SoC was built using an open-source tool set put together by Efabless. Its PicoRV32 32-bit… Read More

Embench Embedded Benchmark Project Calls for Aid

A call-to-arms has been raised by the Embench team for assistance in developing a new, fully-open benchmark suite designed to offer embedded developers an alternative to the products of the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EMBC). As detailed in an article on EE Times, the Embench team is working to… Read More