lowRISC
 | |
| Company type | Community Interest Company |
|---|---|
| Founded | October 20, 2014 in Cambridge, UK |
| Founders | Gavin Ferris, Alex Bradbury, Robert Mullins |
| Headquarters | Cambridge , United Kingdom |
| Products | Ibex, OpenTitan |
| Website | lowrisc |
lowRISC C.I.C. is a not-for-profit company headquartered in Cambridge, UK. It uses collaborative engineering to develop and maintain open source silicon designs and tools.[1] lowRISC is active in RISC-V-related open source hardware and software development and stewards the OpenTitan project.
Projects
[edit]OpenTitan
[edit]OpenTitan is the first open source silicon Root of Trust (RoT) project.[2] It is designed to be integrated into data center servers, storage devices, peripherals and other hardware.[3] OpenTitan is under the stewardship of lowRISC and collaboratively developed by Google, ETH Zurich, Nuvoton, G+D Mobile Security, Seagate, and Western Digital.[4] The OpenTitan source code is available on GitHub, released under the permissive Apache 2 license.
Ibex CPU core
[edit]Ibex is an embedded open source 32-bit in-order RISC-V CPU core, which has been taped out multiple times.[5] 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.[6] Luca Benini of the ETH Zurich sits on lowRISC' board.
Prototype 64-bit SoC design
[edit]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.[7] Since then features were added, such as support for tagged memory and "minion cores", small CPU cores which are dedicated to I/O tasks.[8] The latest version 0.6 was released in November 2018,[9] and is available to download and try out on an FPGA.
Other projects
[edit]lowRISC initiated and led the upstreaming of the RISC-V LLVM backend, where Alex Bradbury is code owner.[10]
Governance
[edit]Board of directors
[edit]- Andy Hopper (Independent Chair)
- Will Drewry (Google)
- Gavin Ferris (CEO, lowRISC)
- Robert Mullins (University of Cambridge)
- Claudia Eckert (TU Munich, Fraunhofer AISEC)
- Cyrus Stoller (Google)
Additionally, Mark Hayter of Google sits on the board as an observer.[1]
History
[edit]lowRISC was spun out of the University of Cambridge Computer Lab in 2014 by Alex Bradbury, Robert Mullins, and Gavin Ferris[1] with the goal of creating a fully open source SoC and low-cost development board.[11][12]
In 2015 lowRISC became one of the founding members of the RISC-V Foundation (today: RISC-V International).[13]
Since 2018 lowRISC has been focusing on collaborative engineering with partner organizations. In 2019 the OpenTitan project, stewarded by lowRISC, was announced.[14]
References
[edit]- ^ a b c "About lowRISC". lowrisc.org. Retrieved 24 March 2021.
- ^ Anderson, Tim (5 Nov 2019). "Cambridge boffins and Google unveil open-source OpenTitan chip – because you never know who you can trust". The Register. Retrieved 24 March 2021.
- ^ "Open source silicon Root of Trust". opentitan.org.
- ^ "OpenTitan partners". opentitan.org. Retrieved 24 March 2021.
- ^ "Ibex: An embedded 32 bit RISC-V CPU core". Retrieved 24 March 2021.
- ^ "Ibex Reference Guide: History". Retrieved 24 March 2021.
- ^ "lowRISC tagged memory preview release". lowrisc.org. April 13, 2015. Retrieved 24 March 2021.
- ^ "Overview of the minion infrastructure". lowrisc.org. Retrieved 24 March 2021.
- ^ "lowRISC 0-6 milestone release". lowrisc.org. 2018-11-12. Retrieved 24 March 2021.
- ^ Bradbury, Alex. "The RISC-V LLVM backend in Clang/LLVM 9.0". lowrisc.org. Retrieved 24 March 2021.
- ^ "Free Core, Some Assembly Required". EETimes. 2016-01-07. Retrieved 24 March 2021.
- ^ "LowRISC SoC - 1st RISC-V Workshop". YouTube.
- ^ "Founding Members". riscv.org. Retrieved 24 March 2021.
- ^ Bradbury, Alex (2019-11-05). "Announcing OpenTitan, the First Transparent Silicon Root of Trust".
