RISC-V ISA Motivates Youth

By Rick O’Connor, Executive Director of the RISC-V Foundation

We recently learned of a young man’s story and inspiration to acquire more knowledge about RISC-V. During the past few weeks, we had the chance to connect with him via email and want to share his story.  Located in South Yorkshire, a metropolitan county in England, Joe is an ambitious and passionate technologist who aims to understand and be at the forefront of any new technology. At the young age of thirteen, Joe has a burning desire to understand how things work and found that do it yourself (DIY) projects are the best way to learn something new and grow intellectually. This aspiration motivated him to build his very own 8-bit TTL computer and inspired him to start writing his own toy programming language with a C++ compiler. As he became engrossed with his DIY projects, Joe looked to alternative architectures that would help him achieve his goals and ultimately he found the RISC-V ISA. Joe has plans to tackle a few other DIY projects such as building mini-game consoles, audio synthesizers and LoreWAN gateways to name a few.

A collage of Joe receiving his RISC-V package.

Stories like Joe’s inspire us all to continue to grow as individuals and reminds us to continue to challenge ourselves. In response to his enthusiasm around RISC-V, we shipped Joe an autographed and inscribed copy of “The RISC-V Reader: An Open Architecture Atlas” and a RISC-V T-shirt in addition to Vega and Arty development boards donated by member companies NXP and SiFive to fuel his technological curiosity. If this story inspired you as much as it did with us, we encourage you to follow Joe on Twitter and read up on his blog, where he is currently documenting his progress making a 4 bit CPU. Vice Chair of the Board for the RISC-V Foundation, David Patterson, and Chief Engineer at SiFive, Andrew Waterman, posed for a photo with their autographed and inscribed “The RISC-V Reader: An Open Architecture Atlas” book at the RISC-V Summit in Santa Clara, California. Joe’s story is a testament to the power of the open and free RISC-V ISA. Everyone – from young engineers to seasoned industry veterans—can leverage the ISA and create. We look forward to hearing more passionate stories like Joe’s. If you have a project you’re working on with the ISA, we’d love to hear from you. The possibilities are endless for the ISA and Joe’s work with RISC-V is a great example of how big our ecosystem has become and continues to grow. Thanks for sharing your story, Joe. Keep us posted on your progress.]]>