| Logo Alt: | Red icon of circuit board traces next to the text lowRISC |
| lowRISC C.I.C. | |
| Type: | Community Interest Company |
| Founded: | in Cambridge, UK |
| Founders: | Gavin Ferris, Alex Bradbury, Robert Mullins |
| Hq Location City: | Cambridge |
| Hq Location Country: | United Kingdom |
| Products: | Ibex, OpenTitan |
lowRISC C.I.C. is a not-for-profit company headquartered in Cambridge, UK. It uses collaborative engineering to develop and maintain open source silicon designs and tools.[1] lowRISC is active in RISC-V-related open source hardware and software development and stewards the OpenTitan project.
OpenTitan is the first open source silicon Root of Trust (RoT) project.[2] It is designed to be integrated into data center servers, storage devices, peripherals and other hardware.[3] OpenTitan is under the stewardship of lowRISC and collaboratively developed by Google, ETH Zurich, Nuvoton, G+D Mobile Security, Seagate, and Western Digital.[4] The OpenTitan source code is available on GitHub, released under the permissive Apache 2 license.
Ibex is an embedded open source 32-bit in-order RISC-V CPU core, which has been taped out multiple times.[5] Ibex is used in the OpenTitan chip.Development on Ibex started in 2015 under the name "Zero-riscy" and "Micro-riscy" at the ETH Zurich and University of Bologna, where it was part of the PULP platform. In December 2018 lowRISC took over the development.[6] Luca Benini of the ETH Zurich sits on lowRISC' board.
The lowRISC prototype 64-bit SoC design is an open source Linux-capable 64-bit RISC-V SoC design. A first version preview release of the source code was made available in April 2015.[7] Since then features were added, such as support for tagged memory and "minion cores", small CPU cores which are dedicated to I/O tasks.[8] The latest version 0.6 was released in November 2018,[9] and is available to download and try out on an FPGA.
lowRISC initiated and led the upstreaming of the RISC-V LLVM backend, where Alex Bradbury is code owner.[10]
lowRISC's governance and current appointed directors are set out in its entry at the UK Companies House.[11]
lowRISC was spun out of the University of Cambridge Computer Lab in 2014[12] by Alex Bradbury, Robert Mullins, and Gavin Ferris with the goal of creating a fully open source SoC and low-cost development board.[13] [14]
In 2015 lowRISC became one of the founding members of the RISC-V Foundation (today: RISC-V International).[15]
Since 2018 lowRISC has been focusing on collaborative engineering with partner organizations. In 2019 the OpenTitan project, stewarded by lowRISC, was announced.[16]
