Open development for SOCs gets major boost with new collaboration

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 22, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — CHIPS Alliance, the leading consortium advancing common and open hardware for interfaces, processors and systems, today announced industry leading chipmaker Intel as it’s newest member. Intel is contributing the Advanced Interface Bus (AIB) to CHIPS Alliance to foster broad adoption.

CHIPS Alliance is hosted by the Linux Foundation to foster a collaborative environment to accelerate the creation and deployment of open SoCs, peripherals and software tools for use in mobile, computing, consumer electronics and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The CHIPS Alliance project develops high-quality open source Register Transfer Level (RTL) code and software development tools relevant to the design of open source CPUs, SoCs, and complex peripherals for Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and custom silicon.

Intel is joining CHIPS Alliance to share the Advanced Interface Bus (AIB) as an open-source, royalty-free PHY-level standard for connecting multiple semiconductor die within the same package. This effort is intended to encourage an industry environment in which silicon IP can be developed using any semiconductor process as a “chiplet,” and easily integrated with other chiplets into a single device to deliver new levels of functionality and optimization. Broader adoption and support for AIB-enabled chiplets will help device developers grow beyond the limits of traditional monolithic semiconductor manufacturing and reduce the cost of development. Working together, Intel and CHIPS Alliance will encourage the growth of an industry ecosystem which engenders more device innovation via heterogeneous integration.

The AIB specifications and collateral will be further developed in the Interconnects workgroup. The group will begin work imminently to make new contributions to foster increased innovation and adoption. All AIB technical details will be placed in the CHIPS Alliance github. In addition, Intel will have a seat on the governing board of CHIPS Alliance. Go to www.chipsalliance.org to learn more about the organization or to join the workgroup mailing list.

“We couldn’t be more happy to welcome Intel to CHIPS Alliance.” said Dr. Zvonimir Bandić, Chairman, CHIPS Alliance, and senior director of next-generation platforms architecture at Western Digital. “Intel’s selection of CHIPS Alliance for the AIB specifications affirms the leading role that the organization impacts for open source hardware and software development tools. We look forward to faster adoption of AIB as an open source chiplet interface.”

About the CHIPS Alliance

The CHIPS Alliance is an organization which develops and hosts high-quality, open source hardware code (IP cores), interconnect IP (physical and logical protocols), and open source software development tools for design, verification, and more. The main aim is to provide a barrier-free collaborative environment, to lower the cost of developing IP and tools for hardware development. The CHIPS Alliance is hosted by the Linux Foundation. For more information, visit chipsalliance.org.

About the Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation was founded in 2000 and has since become the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Today, the Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and its projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure, including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more. The Linux Foundation focuses on employing best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, visit linuxfoundation.org.

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