The lowRISC blog

Third RISC-V Workshop: Day One

January 5, 2016

The third RISC-V workshop is going on today and tomorrow at the Oracle Conference Center, California. I’ll be keeping a semi-live blog of talks and announcements throughout the day. See here for notes from the second day. Introductions and RISC-V Foundation Overview: Rick O’Connor Save the date, the 4th RISC-V workshop will be July 12th-13th at the MIT CSAIL/Stata Center. In August 2015, articles of incorporation were filed to create a non-profit RISC-V Foundation to govern the ISA.

Untethered lowRISC release

December 18, 2015

Over the past several months, we’ve been working to provide a standalone or ‘untethered’ SoC. Cores in the original Rocket chip rely on communicating with a companion processor via the host-target interface (HTIF) to access peripherals and I/O. This release removes this requirement, adding an I/O bus and instantiating FPGA peripherals. The accompanying tutorial, written by Wei Song, describes how to build this code release and explains the underlying structural changes.

lowRISC at ORConf 2015

August 16, 2015

Please join us October 9th-11th in Geneva, Switzerland for ORConf 2015. The event is kindly being hosted by CERN at the IdeaSquare. Last year’s ORConf was home to the first public talk on lowRISC and we’re delighted this year it will also be hosting a series of lowRISC and RISC-V discussions, serving as a European lowRISC and RISC-V workshop. ORConf has in recent years grown to cover a range of open source hardware topics beyond the original OpenRISC focus.

Second RISC-V Workshop: Day Two

June 30, 2015

It’s the second day of the second RISC-V workshop today in Berkeley, California. I’ll be keeping a semi-live blog of talks and announcements throughout the day. Z-scale. Tiny 32-bit RISC-V Systems: Yunsup Lee Z-Scale is a family of tiny cores, similar in spirit to the ARM Cortex-M family. It integrates with the AHB-Lite interconnect. Contrast to Rocket (in-order cores, 64-bit, 32-bit, dual-issue options), and BOOM (a family of out-of-order cores).

Second RISC-V Workshop: Day One

June 29, 2015

The second RISC-V workshop is going on today and tomorrow in Berkeley, California. I’ll be keeping a semi-live blog of talks and announcements throughout the day. Introductions and welcome: Krste Asanović The beginning of Krste’s talk will be familiar for anyone who’s seen an introduction to RISC-V before. Pleasingly, there are a lot of new faces here at the workshop so the introduction of course makes a lot of sense.

Summer of Code students for lowRISC

May 13, 2015

lowRISC was fortunate enough to be chosen as a mentoring organisation in this year’s Google Summer of Code. The Google Summer of Code program funds students to work on open source projects over the summer. We had 52 applications across the range of project ideas we’ve been advertising. As you can see from the range of project ideas, lowRISC is taking part as an umbrella organisation, working with a number of our friends in the wider open source software and hardware community.

lowRISC tagged memory preview release

April 13, 2015

We’re pleased to announce the first lowRISC preview release, demonstrating support for tagged memory as described in our memo. Our ambition with lowRISC is to provide an open-source System-on-Chip platform for others to build on, along with low-cost development boards featuring a reference implementation. Although there’s more work to be done on the tagged memory implementation, now seemed a good time to document what we’ve done in order for the wider community to take a look.