The lowRISC blog

2017 NetFPGA Design Challenge

As most of you know, the majority of full-time development on lowRISC takes place at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. However, we’re far from the only open source hardware activity at the University. Our colleagues on the NetFPGA project have an open source design challenge that many readers of this blog might be interested in. See the design challenge website, or read below for more details: We are pleased to announce the 2017 NetFPGA Design Challenge!

lowRISC Q+A

Yesterday, lowRISC triggered a lot of discussion when someone submitted it to Hacker News. The comment thread became something of an impromptu Q+A about our project direction and status. I thought it was worth linking to it here and highlighting the discussion for a wider audience. If you have any additional questions, then feel free to comment on this blog post or else, as always, drop by our mailing list.

Fifth RISC-V Workshop: Day Two

Today is the second day of the fifth RISC-V workshop. I’ll be keeping a semi-live blog of talks and announcements throughout the day. OpenSoC System Architect: Farzad Fatollahi-Fard Current architectures are wasteful. Only a small fraction of chip area goes to computation. For both GoblinCore and OpenHPC, ended up doing a lot of similar work to achieve only a point design. Why not make a generator to avoid repeating the same steps?

Fifth RISC-V Workshop: Day One

The fifth RISC-V workshop is going on today and tomorrow at the Google’s Quad Campus in Mountain View. I’ll be keeping a semi-live blog of talks and announcements throughout the day. Introduction: Rick O’Connor and Dom Rizzo This workshop is yet again bigger than the last. 350+ attendees, 107 companies, 29 universities. The next workshop will be May 9th-10 in Shanghai, China. RISC-V at UC San Diego: Michael Taylor Startup software stacks today look a light like an iceberg.

Generating a Gantt chart from HJSON input

This blog post is a slight departure from the normal topics here. Worry not, we’ll return to discussing Verilog, Chisel, and low-level software work soon. I wrote a quick script to help serve a need (producing a Gantt chart) and thought perhaps others would find it useful. There are a wide range of online services to help produce and maintain Gantt charts, but none quite offered what I was looking for.

lowRISC+IMC internship: second update

This is the second update from our team of interns, comprised of four University of Cambridge undergrads. Their work is kindly sponsored by IMC Financial Markets who are also helping to advise this summer project. At the time of our last blog post, we had just finished VGA and were working on implementing the frame buffer. Over the last 2 weeks, we have made significant progress, completing the frame buffer and starting video decode.

Notes from the fourth RISC-V workshop

Many of the lowRISC team (Robert Mullins, Wei Song, and Alex Bradbury) have been in Boston this week for the fourth RISC-V workshop. By any measure, this has been a massive success with over 250 attendees representing 63 companies and 42 Universities. Wei presented our most recent work on integrating trace debug, which you’ll soon be able to read much more about here (it’s worth signing up to our announcement list if you want to be informed of each of our releases).

lowRISC / IMC internship week one - VGA output

Begnning on Monday, June 27th, we had a team of four University of Cambridge undergrads begin a 10 week internship working on the lowRISC project at the Computer Laboratory, kindly sponsored by IMC Financial Markets (who are also helping to advise this project). The team will be blogging regularly over the course of the summer - I’ll pass over to them to introduce themselves. After some initial brainstorming, we decided to aim to extend the current lowRISC SoC design to enable video output, with the final goal of playing video smoothly at a resolution of 640x480 on FPGA.

Announcing the LibreCores design contest and ORConf 2016

Our friends and collaborators at the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation have launched the LibreCores design contest. This is a student design contest which aims to recognise and reward contributions to the open source hardware ecosystem. The main evaluation criteria are: Openness. Your work must be published under an established Open Source license. Reusability. How easily can your work be used and modified by someone else? Is it well documented?

lowRISC's 2016 Google Summer of Code Students

The 2016 Google Summer of Code is now underway and we’re delighted to be working with five students, covering a variety of interesting projects. They have all introduced themselves over the past few weeks on our project mailing list. Many thanks to everyone who applied, to the mentors who volunteered, and to Google for sponsoring this programme. If your application was unsuccessful, I hope you’ll try again next year. The projects for lowRISC in the 2016 GSoC are: