Tag: FOSSi

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

CRU: New Open Silicon Releases, Xilinx’ Vitis, and More

Semiconductor Engineering’s Ann Steffora Mutschler has highlighted the growing popularity of open instruction set architectures (ISAs) like RISC-V and the newly-opened Power ISA, in a piece with input from a range of industry experts. “It’s become so cumbersome to go into building chips because of all these factors,” OpenPOWER processor… Read More

Xilinx Turns to Open Source for New Vitis Unified Software Platform

Xilinx has announced the launch of the Vitis development platform, designed to allow the like of software engineers and artificial intelligence (AI) scientists to take advantage of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) – and it builds on open-source software. “With exponentially increasing compute needs, engineers and scientists are often limited by… Read More

RISC-V Foundation Announces Security-Focused Soft-Core CPU Contest Winners

The RISC-V Foundation has announced the winners of its RISC-V Soft CPU Contest, launched back in July with a view to promoting security-focused RISC-V implementations. “With the proliferation of connected devices, security is one of the key challenges in hardware design. The free and open RISC-V ISA presents an… Read More

1st CLaaS and Google Summer of Code Work to “Open The Floodgates” of Free and Open Source Silicon

Redwood EDA’s Steve Hoover has written of a Google Summer of Code student who “helped open the floodgates” of free and open source silicon (FOSSi) by contributing to the 1st CLaaS framework project: Ákos Hadnagy. “While [the] open source silicon community is a hotbed of enthusiasm, it is several decades… Read More

Semiconductor Engineering Finds Open ISAs Gaining Traction in Industry

Inspur Announces TF2 Open-Source Deep-Learning Engine Framework for FPGAs

High-performance computing (HPC) specialist Inspur has announced the release of TF2, a full-stack framework for efficient artificial intelligence computing on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), under the permissive Apache 2.0 licence. “The deployment of AI applications covers the cloud, the edge, and the mobile end, and has highly diverse requirements. TF2… Read More

CRU: RISC-V Momentum, Carbon Nanotubes, Fire, ICE, and More

RISC-V Foundation chief executive officer Calista Redmond has written of increasing momentum for RISC-V, as the semiconductor industry begins to shift away from proprietary closed-source core. “Interest in RISC-V has been gaining steam with commercial implementations and adoption rapidly growing. It has been incredible to witness how RISC-V has fostered… Read More

OpenPower Foundation, IBM Release Fire and ICE OMI Reference Implementations

IBM has made good on its commitment, through the OpenPOWER Foundation, to release an Open Memory Interface (OMI) under a permissive licence, with the first reference designs for its Fire OMI host and ICE two-port DDR4 OMI device hitting GitHub this month. The OpenPOWER Foundation made the surprising announcement that… Read More

Antmicro Releases FastVDMA Open-Source Resource-Light DMA Controller

Antmicro has announced the release of FastVDMA, an open-source direct memory access (DMA) controller designed to improve the freedom of FPGA-based free and open source silicon projects. “One of the main motivations leading to the design of an open source DMA controller was the lack of portable open source alternatives… Read More

Calista Redmond Points to Growing Momentum for FOSSi, RISC-V

FOSSi Foundation Details Google Summer of Code 2019 Project Wins

The Free and Open Source Silicon (FOSSi) Foundation has announced the end of its participation in the 2019 Google Summer of Code programme, with seven students contributing to projects under the Foundation’s umbrella mentorship. Run by Google each year as a means of matching students with mentors already in the… Read More

Nvidia Turns to RISC-V for RC18 Research Chip IO Core

High-performance computing company Nvidia has detailed another of its products to use the open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA), this time as an input/output core in an inference accelerator part it calls RC18. Developed by the company last year and unveiled in detail during the Hot Chips conference, RC18 is… Read More