Project Stewardship

lowRISC® are the proud stewards and maintainers of the OpenTitan® project, and manage several smaller open-source projects. 

Our legal structure as a Community Interest Company (a not-for-profit), our mission to achieve commercial deployment of open-source hardware, and our expertise in the Silicon Commons® methodology for open silicon development put us in an ideal position for this stewardship role.

In addition, lowRISC has a full stack engineering team, which enables us to maintain and improve the project’s engineering infrastructure, help contributors, and develop technical expertise in the design to enhance it over time and provide long-term support. All these make the project more attractive to potential users.

We are always looking for new open-source hardware initiatives. If you have an idea for a new project, contact us.

OpenTitan stewardship

OpenTitan is a complex multi-year project with many project contributors, generating multiple top-levels, tens of IP components and several generations of SoC designs. The success of OpenTitan demonstrates our capability as project stewards.

In practice, the smooth running of the project entails many areas:

Engineering infrastructure

OpenTitan is the world’s most active open silicon project, with over 630 contributors, 66,000 commits and 400,000 lines of System Verilog.

This complexity requires a strong engineering infrastructure , managed and maintained by lowRISC, including:

• Server and cloud infrastructure
• Continuous Integration and regression test systems
• Unit test and verification systems
• FPGA and ASIC targets for software validation

lowRISC employees are experienced in managing open silicon projects for commercial deployment, and they ensure the right practices are followed in the day-to-day running of the project.

Community

lowRISC ensures the smooth running of the OpenTitan governing board, technical committee and working groups. We ensure that members are involved at the right level of decision making, and that decisions get cascaded.

At lowRISC we also engage with the broader ecosystem of tools, silicon and software vendors to ensure the success of the project. For example, we do this through the maintenance of the OpenTitan website, provision of technical support, and coordination of vulnerability disclosure.

Finally, open-source designs like OpenTitan are a great target for research: e.g. in security or AI agent development. We engage with universities, research groups and innovative startups to support them in their endeavours.

Quality

Achieving commercial deployment is a fundamental part of lowRISC’s mission. As project stewards we ensure the high quality of all of the project deliverables.

In practice, this requires that we implement a funding model for our projects which enables strong engineering infrastructure, significant design verification effort and comprehensive documentation. We also hire world class engineers to ensure the quality of the contributions.

Visibility

At lowRISC we actively promote our projects through the web, social media and events. We proactively engage with existing and potential IP users and seek new project members.