lowRISC

Membership: Founding Member, Full Member

Description

Founded in 2014 at the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology, lowRISC is a not-for-profit company/CIC that provides a neutral home for collaborative engineering to develop and maintain open-source silicon designs and tools for the long term. The lowRISC not-for-profit structure combined with full-stack engineering capabilities in-house enables the hosting and management of high-quality projects like OpenTitan via the Silicon Commons approach.

CHERI Activities

lowRISC is a founding member of the CHERI Alliance.

Microsoft independently selected Ibex, lowRISC’s CPU core, as the reference platform for their open source CHERIoT development — which makes the proven CHERI hardware security extensions viable even for applications with tight power, memory, or cost constraints. lowRISC has subsequently collaborated with Microsoft to help bring the CHERIoT-Ibex core to production grade.

To further encourage adoption of this exciting technology, lowRISC has been working with UKRI and DSbD on the Sunburst project — creating a fully open-source platform, Sonata, that enables users to evaluate CHERIoT Ibex (in advance of ASIC availability). Of particular focus are domains such as operational technology, embedded systems, and IoT.

Longer term, we’re progressing our work with the CHERI hardware security extension, with the aim of bringing the innovative CHERIoT-Ibex core to production silicon, leveraging our work with Microsoft, InnovateUK and the Digital Security by Design (DSbD) programme.

CHERI Products

https://www.sunburst-project.org/

Open-source Assets for CHERI

https://www.sunburst-project.org/