LowRISC

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.

lowRISC C.I.C.

Company type	Community Interest Company
Founded	October 20, 2014; 10 years ago (2014-10-20) in Cambridge, UK
Founders	Gavin Ferris, Alex Bradbury, Robert Mullins
Headquarters	Cambridge , United Kingdom
Products	Ibex, OpenTitan
Website	lowrisc.org

Projects

OpenTitan

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 CPU core

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.

Prototype 64-bit SoC design

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.

Other projects

lowRISC initiated and led the upstreaming of the RISC-V LLVM backend, where Alex Bradbury is code owner.^[10]

Governance

lowRISC's governance and current appointed directors are set out in its entry at the UK Companies House.^[11]

History

lowRISC was spun out of the University of Cambridge Computer Lab in 2014 by Alex Bradbury, Robert Mullins, and Gavin Ferris^[1] with the goal of creating a fully open source SoC and low-cost development board.^[12][13]

In 2015 lowRISC became one of the founding members of the RISC-V Foundation (today: RISC-V International).^[14]

Since 2018 lowRISC has been focusing on collaborative engineering with partner organizations. In 2019 the OpenTitan project, stewarded by lowRISC, was announced.^[15]