By: Iris Zheng, Digital Marketing Intern, RISC-V International
Five technical leaders were honored at RISC-V Summit Europe 2024 for their remarkable contributions to the RISC-V Community. Let’s celebrate their induction into the RISC-V Hall of Fame and explore the achievements of this year’s winners and those from previous years.
Technical Leadership Awards
The winners of the Technical Leadership awards are Dr. Yungang Bao, Chief Scientist at the Beijing Institute of Open Source Chip, and Richard Newell, Associate Technical Fellow at Microchip Technology.
Dr. Yungang Bao translated the RISC-V specifications into the Chinese language, unified the open-source chip research in China behind RISC-V, and established XianShan as an open-source, high-performance out-of-order implementation of RISC-V.
Discussing the importance of RISC-V to his work, Dr. Bao said, “RISC-V, as an open standard, affords me the opportunity to develop an open-source CPU implementation. Without RISC-V, we would not have been able to launch the open-source XiangShan project, because other instruction sets require licensing.” Dr. Bao took the stage at RISC-V Summit Europe to discuss key contributions the BOSC has made or plans to make to the open-source chip ecosystem in terms of exploration, achievements, and lessons learned. For more details, watch the presentation here.
Richard Newell has focused his RISC-V work in security and vector processing. He was instrumental in forming the first RISC-V Security Standing Committee, signaling the importance of security in RISC-V.
“From that humble beginning with just 2 or 3 people we have expanded the security organization to a dozen groups with hundreds of contributors. My personal contributions have mainly been in the cryptographic extensions aided by some knowledge of the field, lots of perseverance, and the work of a dozen very talented regular contributors.” Since then, Richard’s work has only continued, “ [completing] several sets of cryptographic extensions, several being novel in the CPU industry. Now [they] are tackling raising the assurance level for the most common cryptographic algorithms beyond what any other ISA offers.”
Technical Contributor Awards
The winners of the Technical Contributor awards are Paul Ku of Andes Technology, Ken Dockser of Tenstorrent, and Beeman Strong of Rivos, Inc.
Paul Ku is the Deputy Technical Director at Andes Technology, and Ken Dockser is the Senior Principal Architect at Tenstorrent. Both Ku and Dockser worked together on Input/Output Physical Memory Protection (IOPMP), a security measure for RISC-V memory access by I/O agents such as Page Component Interconnect (PCI) adapters or graphics processing units (GPUs). Dockser worked on the specification and main driver for the IOPMP proposal. When IOPMP TG was formed in mid-2022, Ku stepped up to take on the chair position. Since then, Ku worked with the vice-chair and TG members closely to improve the spec based on members’ feedback and delivered speeches at many RISC-V conferences to promote IOPMP. Describing the IOPMP task group, Ku said, “A group started from a simple idea, initiated the charter, kicked off the task group discussion, got feedback from different angles, and finally, we wish[ed] to deliver a practical, flexible, and consistent specification. This project not only challenged me technically but also underscored the potential of this open-source hardware community.”
Beeman Strong is the Principal Engineer at Rivos, Inc. His focus has been advancing RISC-V’s performance monitoring capabilities. Strong has steered the Performance Analysis Special Interest Group (SIG), authored Indirect CSR ISA extensions (Smcsrind, Sscsrind), and leads the Control Transfer Records Task Group (TG). Strong also played a key role in advancing a study benchmarking RISC-V’s performance analysis features against competing architectures, enabling the creation of new ISA extensions and TGs to fix these gaps.
Of his work with RISC-V, Strong said, “It’s exciting to be able to use my expertise and learnings from defining ISA for other architectures to help RISC-V include the kind of cutting edge capabilities that customers want, and that are needed to compete in the marketplace.”
Thank you to all the award winners and community for their ongoing commitment to RISC-V through collaboration, contribution, and innovation on RISC-V. The RISC-V community is catalyzing RISC-V as the most profound open architecture underpinning generations of computing – now and for the future.
To watch presentations from RISC-V Summit Europe 2024, please visit our YouTube channel. Hoping to meet the community in person? Register today to join us at RISC-V Summit North America, this October!
RISC-V International invites you to submit nominations for the RISC-V Community Leader of the Year award. Submit your nominations by September 8 for an individual demonstrating exceptional leadership and community engagement. The recipient will be honored at RISC-V Summit North America.