lowRISC
C.I.C. is a
not-for-profit company
A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...
headquartered in
Cambridge, UK. It uses
collaborative engineering to develop and maintain open source silicon designs and tools.
lowRISC is active in
RISC-V-related
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
hardware and software development and stewards the OpenTitan project.
Projects
OpenTitan
OpenTitan is the first open source silicon Root of Trust (RoT) project. It is designed to be integrated into data center servers, storage devices, peripherals and other hardware. OpenTitan is under the stewardship of lowRISC and collaboratively developed by
Google,
ETH Zurich
(colloquially)
, former_name = eidgenössische polytechnische Schule
, image = ETHZ.JPG
, image_size =
, established =
, type = Public
, budget = CHF 1.896 billion (2021)
, rector = Günther Dissertori
, president = Joël Mesot
, ac ...
,
Nuvoton,
G+D Mobile Security,
Seagate, and
Western Digital. The OpenTitan source code is available on
GitHub, released under the
permissive Apache 2 license.
Ibex CPU core
Ibex is an embedded open source 32-bit in-order
RISC-V CPU core, which has been taped out multiple times. Ibex is used in the OpenTitan chip.
Development on Ibex started in 2015 under the name "Zero-riscy" and "Micro-riscy" at the ETH Zurich and University of Bologna, where it was part of the PULP platform. In December 2018 lowRISC took over the development. Luca Benini of the ETH Zurich sits on lowRISC' board.
Prototype 64-bit SoC design
The lowRISC prototype 64-bit SoC design is an open source Linux-capable 64-bit
RISC-V SoC design. A first version preview release of the source code was made available in April 2015. Since then features were added, such as support for tagged memory and "minion cores", small CPU cores which are dedicated to I/O tasks. The latest version 0.6 was released in November 2018, and is available to download and try out on an
FPGA
A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturinghence the term '' field-programmable''. The FPGA configuration is generally specified using a hardware de ...
.
Other Projects
lowRISC initiated and led the upstreaming of the
RISC-V LLVM backend, where Alex Bradbury is code owner.
Governance
Board of Directors
*
Andy Hopper (Independent Chair, Treasurer and Vice President of the
Royal Society)
* Luca Benini (
ETH Zurich
(colloquially)
, former_name = eidgenössische polytechnische Schule
, image = ETHZ.JPG
, image_size =
, established =
, type = Public
, budget = CHF 1.896 billion (2021)
, rector = Günther Dissertori
, president = Joël Mesot
, ac ...
)
* Gavin Ferris (CEO, lowRISC)
* Ron Minnich (
Google)
* Robert Mullins (
University of Cambridge)
* Dominic Rizzo (Google, OpenTitan project director)
* Claudia Eckert (
TU Munich
The Technical University of Munich (TUM or TU Munich; german: Technische Universität München) is a public research university in Munich, Germany. It specializes in engineering, technology, medicine, and applied and natural sciences.
Establis ...
, Fraunhofer AISEC)
Additionally, Mark Hayter of Google sits on the board as an observer.
History
lowRISC was spun out of the
University of Cambridge Computer Lab in 2014 by Alex Bradbury, Robert Mullins, and Gavin Ferris
with the goal of creating a fully open source
SoC and low-cost development board.
In 2015 lowRISC became one of the founding members of the
RISC-V Foundation (today: RISC-V International).
Since 2018 lowRISC has been focusing on collaborative engineering with partner organizations.
In 2019 the OpenTitan project, stewarded by lowRISC, was announced.
References
External links
* {{Official website
Open-source hardware
Non-profit organisations based in England