lowRISC C.I.C. is a not-for-profit company headquartered in

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a College town, university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cam ...

, UK. It uses collaborative engineering to develop and maintain open source silicon designs and tools. lowRISC is active in

RISC-V RISC-V (pronounced "risk-five" where five refers to the number of generations of RISC architecture that were developed at the University of California, Berkeley since 1981) is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on estab ...

-related open source 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 Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

, ETH Zurich,

Nuvoton Nuvoton Technology Corporation () is a Taiwan-based semiconductor company established in 2008. It spun off from Winbond Electronics Corp. as a wholly owned subsidiary. Overview Nuvoton's main product lines are microcontroller application IC, ...

, G+D Mobile Security, Seagate, and

Western Digital Western Digital Corporation (WDC, commonly known as Western Digital or WD) is an American computer drive manufacturer and data storage company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology produc ...

. The OpenTitan source code is available on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continu ...

, released under the

permissive {{about, , the 1970 British film, Permissive (film), the grammatical mode, Permissive mood, the flavor of software license, permissive free software licence A permissive cell or host is one that allows a virus to circumvent its defenses and replica ...

Apache 2 license.

Ibex CPU core

Ibex is an embedded open source 32-bit in-order

CPU core A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, and ...

, 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

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.

Other Projects

lowRISC initiated and led the upstreaming of the

LLVM LLVM is a set of compiler and toolchain technologies that can be used to develop a front end for any programming language and a back end for any instruction set architecture. LLVM is designed around a language-independent intermediate repre ...

backend, where Alex Bradbury is code owner.

Governance

Board of Directors

Andy Hopper Sir Andrew Hopper (born 1953) is a British-Polish Computer Technologist and entrepreneur. He is treasurer and vice-president of the Royal Society, Professor of Computer Technology, former Head of the University of Cambridge Department of Compu ...

(Independent Chair, Treasurer and Vice President of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

) * Luca Benini ( ETH Zurich) * Gavin Ferris (CEO, lowRISC) * Ron Minnich (

) * Robert Mullins (

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

) * Dominic Rizzo (Google, OpenTitan project director) * Claudia Eckert ( TU Munich, Fraunhofer AISEC) Additionally, Mark Hayter of Google sits on the board as an observer.

History

lowRISC was spun out of the

Computer Lab A computer lab is a space where computer services are provided to a defined community. These are typically public libraries and academic institution Academic institution is an educational institution dedicated to education and research, which ...

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