What is lowRISC?
lowRISC® C.I.C. (Community Interest Company) is a regulated not-for-profit company with a mission to help make open-source silicon a reality, commercially relevant, and widely adopted throughout the industry.
As a non-profit community interest company, lowRISC carries out this mission with the ultimate aim of benefiting the open-source hardware community generally.
We aim to bring to semiconductors the enormous benefits that open-source already provides to software: transparency, reuse and collaboration.
We progress our mission by stewarding and contributing to open-source projects in a way that protects their commercial viability.
lowRISC is registered in England and Wales with Company number 09272283. Our registered office address is 7 Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 1GE, UK.
Values
lowRISC is different. Here are some of the things that distinguish us in the open silicon world, and which drive and shape our work:
Being a not-for-profit
lowRISC is a Community Interest Company (CIC). A CIC is a type of company designed for social enterprises that want to use their profits and assets for the public good. In the case of lowRISC, that public good is embodied in our mission to foster commercially viable open silicon.
CICs have all the flexibility, certainty and obligations of a regular company, but with special features to ensure they are working for the benefit of the community:
- We cannot pay dividends, and any surpluses are reinvested in the pursuit of our mission
- We do not have shares nor shareholders, and we cannot be acquired
Being a CIC puts lowRISC in an ideal position to act as a neutral home for projects and multi-party corporate collaborations, and be a trustworthy steward for open-source designs.
Business model
All of our silicon and software designs are open and licensed with a permissive license such as Apache 2.0. This prevents us from generating revenue from a traditional IP licensing or royalty-based business model.
Instead, our revenue comes from corporations, governments and philanthropic organisations who want a new design to happen in the open. This revenue is provided as:
Having multiple revenue sources has been instrumental to give lowRISC financial stability. Long-term, lowRISC’s growth will be fueled by having more corporations and governments relying on open-source hardware as a fundamental component of their strategy.
lowRISC works closely with academic partners and can provide in kind support to them. It also proactively supports and engages with open-source communities at no charge.
If you would like to support lowRISC’s mission by contributing funds, IP or opportunities for engineering consultancy, contact us.
Offices
We are headquartered in Cambridge, at the heart of one of the most successful technology clusters in Europe. Our offices are based in locations that give us access to research and top talent in world-class universities.
Subsidiaries
lowRISC GmbH is a wholly owned Swiss subsidiary of lowRISC C.I.C. that works seamlessly with lowRISC C.I.C. to deliver its mission.
NewAE is a wholly owned subsidiary of lowRISC, with a mission to make hardware security research more accessible by providing affordable open-source tools for side-channel and fault injection testing.
Our NewAE colleagues bring world-class expertise in hardware security and sell a range of tools, boards and training content.
Their best known product brands are ChipWhisperer and ChipShouter.
Our awards
We have been honoured to receive the OpenUK Open Hardware award in 2020, 2022 and 2025, and have been shortlisted for the OpenUK Security award in 2025.
In 2024, lowRISC won the Cambridge Ring Award from the University of Cambridge for Product of the Year: OpenTitan.
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