Onwards and upwards at lowRISC

May 16, 2019

If you haven’t checked it out yet, be sure to take a look at our press release and the corresponding Google blog post. This industry support and growth of our board is a huge step forwards for lowRISC. As Royal Hansen, vice president of Security, Google, said:

"Google believes that open source is good for everyone. To further our commitment, we are investing both capital and engineering resources to create a sustainable open source hardware ecosystem. In addition to engineering resources, lowRISC provides the community stewardship that is vital to this vision”.

We believe high quality engineering, extensive documentation, and verification are essential to drive the adoption of open source silicon designs. The donation of the Ibex core (previously zero-riscy, developed through the PULP project) and its collaborative development under lowRISC is a great step forwards on the open source hardware roadmap we’re working on with Google and other industry partners. Plus of course we’re continuing to lead the upstream RISC-V LLVM effort and further develop our 64-bit SoC platform. If you’re interested in collaboration, get in touch via info@lowrisc.org.

Over the last 6 months we’ve really entered a new phase of the lowRISC mission. We’ve grown from a single full-time engineer to five, with more on their way (check out our active job adverts - we’d love to hear from you!). We’ve not been able to put out anywhere near as many updates as we’d like. The work we’ve been doing to grow the organisation and forge new collaborations is hugely time consuming, and of course embargos etc. come in to play. But you can expect to hear much more from us going forwards.

On a final note, I’d like to shine the spotlight on the whole lowRISC family, especially those who have helped us get this far. In particular I’d like to thank our board of directors, our growing team of full time staff, our technical advisory board, and of course the wider community who have given us so much support, suggestions, and encouragement. Pirmin and Laura will soon be posting more about their experiences joining lowRISC, and you’ll be seeing a number of other new faces on our GitHub, Twitter, and shiny new Zulip group chat - do join and say hi.

Alex Bradbury, CTO and Co-Founder