A non-profit company is developing an open source, 64-bit “lowRISC” SoC that will enable fully open hardware, “from the CPU core to the development board.”

University of Cambridge spinoff “lowRISC” is a not-for-profit company with a goal of making a completely open computing eco-system, including the instruction set architecture (ISA), processor silicon, and development boards. The first step is to develop a new system-on-chip design based on the new, 64-bit RISC-V ISA developed at the University of California, Berkeley.

Further goals listed by the project include:

• To create a fully open SoC and low-cost development board and to support the open-source hardware community. This will involve volume silicon manufacture.
• To explore and promote novel hardware security features
• To make it simple for existing companies and especially semiconductor startups to create derivative designs, e.g. by sharing scripts, tools, source, and our experience
• To create a benchmark design to aid academic research