I am thrilled to see the announcement and initiation of collaboration between CHIPS Alliance and RISC-V International on the OmniXtend Cache Coherency protocol. We have formed a joint working group to strengthen and harden the architecture to allow for the effective collaboration of heterogeneous computational cores, which will open a wide design ecosystem. The collaboration will drive new architectural ideas and will result in innovative products by companies that wish to leverage and build off of the base IP being fostered by the open source hardware community.
CHIPS Alliance was founded two years ago with the goal of making open source silicon a reality. CHIPS Alliance can be viewed as an extension of the mission started by organizations such as RISC-V International. RISC-V defines an open instruction set architecture (ISA) specification which paved the way for a plethora of open cores and CPU implementations, but does not instruct how to make the physical hardware and other building blocks needed to create practical open silicon. This is where CHIPS Alliance begins. Using open standards such as RISC-V, CHIPS Alliance is working with members across the silicon ecosystem to build robust and industry-proven cores, peripherals and SoCs.
It’s clear that lowering the barriers and cost of development requires collaboration among many parties to develop relevant open source design tools – a task that CHIPS Alliance was happy to take on. Today the organization focuses on both open source hardware RTL designs and open source software and hardware design tool development. This new joint working group will also be driven by collaboration, so we encourage the RISC-V community to get involved in this important initiative. I look forward to the collaboration and the subsequent benefits to the silicon development community.
I would also encourage everyone to join the CHIPS Alliance Spring Workshop, taking place on Tuesday, March 30. This free event will feature talks from industry leaders discussing OmniXtend updates, the AIB chiplet ecosystem, Chisel advances and much more. Check out the full schedule and register for free today!
To learn about the CHIPS Alliance, our technical milestones and more, check out our Annual Report.