Engineering Consultancy
We appreciate that sometimes it is not possible to make all deliverables open-source, and we can still contribute to them as long as the project aligns with our vision.
Our consultancy work takes multiple forms:
| Both… | And… |
|---|---|
| Projects requested by commercial partners | Bidding for government grants |
| “Time and materials” | “Deliverables-based” kind of engagements |
| Working directly in the open | Keeping designs embargoed during development |
| Creating new projects | Contributing to existing ones |
| Developing new IP | Maintaining and improving existing components |
Areas of expertise
lowRISC® has a full stack engineering capability and can contribute to a wide variety of projects. The areas that differentiate us are:
Silicon engineering
Silicon engineering is the complex, multi-stage discipline of designing, verifying, and preparing integrated circuits (microchips) for manufacturing. It is the process of turning abstract logic into the physical arrangement of billions of microscopic transistors on a piece of silicon.
The silicon engineering process involves:
- Architecture & Design: Deciding what the chip needs to do and writing the logic using hardware description languages (like SystemVerilog).
- Design Verification (DV): Rigorously simulating and testing the design to find and fix bugs before a single physical chip is made. (This is often the most time-consuming part of the process).
At lowRISC, our silicon engineering teams apply these rigorous industry standards to open silicon, ensuring our community-driven designs are of the highest commercial quality.
- Physical Design: Translating the verified logic into a physical 3D layout of transistors and microscopic wires.
- Tapeout: Sending the final digital blueprints to a semiconductor foundry (fab) to be physically manufactured.
lowRISC supports its partners through the Physical Design and Tapeout processes.
Most of lowRISC’s work is in the open, and you can see the quality of our deliverables in GitHub. We also contribute to other open source projects such as the Caliptra root of trust.
Security in particular is a big focus for lowRISC, covering multiple areas:
- Secure hardware design. This includes hardening a SoC against side-channel analysis (SCA) and fault injection (FI) attacks as well as designing new (cryptographic) IP.
- Pre and post-silicon hardware security analysis. Pre-silicon includes using research tools as well as industry-grade tooling. Pre-and post-silicon includes running SCA and FI experiments on FPGA and silicon in our lab.
- Cryptographic Library. We have expertise in implementing a cryptographic library that follows crypto standards. We do this with security certification, such as Common Criteria, in mind.
Silicon engineering
Silicon engineering is the complex, multi-stage discipline of designing, verifying, and preparing integrated circuits (microchips) for manufacturing. It is the process of turning abstract logic into the physical arrangement of billions of microscopic transistors on a piece of silicon.
The silicon engineering process involves:
- Architecture & Design: Deciding what the chip needs to do and writing the logic using hardware description languages (like SystemVerilog).
- Design Verification (DV): Rigorously simulating and testing the design to find and fix bugs before a single physical chip is made. (This is often the most time-consuming part of the process).
At lowRISC, our silicon engineering teams apply these rigorous industry standards to open silicon, ensuring our community-driven designs are of the highest commercial quality.
- Physical Design: Translating the verified logic into a physical 3D layout of transistors and microscopic wires.
- Tapeout: Sending the final digital blueprints to a semiconductor foundry (fab) to be physically manufactured.
lowRISC supports its partners through the Physical Design and Tapeout processes.
How we engage on a consultancy project
Every consultancy engagement is different, so it is best to contact us to discuss your needs.
Typically we sign a no-disclosure agreement (NDA) and have one of our managers and/or technical leads talk to you to understand your requirements, explain our fee structure and agree on a business model to cover the engagement.
Once we have a high-level agreement, we agree a standard framework services agreement with, one or more, custom statements of work (SoW) to cover the actual engineering work, before proceeding to execute the project.
We believe in bringing transparency to the way we work, and we prefer to work in the open, following the Silicon Commons® methodology. However, we appreciate that some of our deliverables must be initially embargoed or remain closed-source, and we use private GitHub projects to collaborate closely in consultancy work.
We use GitHub to give visibility of active, upcoming and complete tasks to show what we are working on. Our project management team provides timesheet data to communicate the amount of effort spent, and burndown charts (where appropriate) to track actual progress against expectations set in the agreed SoW(s).
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