Please plan to join us Wednesday, January 18, for a discussion about Open Source and the RISC-V processor featuring Jim Hogan of Vista Ventures, Rick O’Connor, executive director of the RISC-V Foundation, and Yunsup Lee, SiFive’s chief technology officer (CTO). They will describe the path from inception to the open source RISC-V ecosystem, explore whether an open source architecture is appropriate for IoT processing needs and what that means for startups and innovation.

As you’ll hear them say, the number of IoT designs is growing at an astronomical pace. IoT devices are capable of sensing the real world. They are prevalent at the edge of the internet, communicating with an external host to process that real-world information. While there are advantages in performance and cost in processing the data locally, doing so requires significant processing capability at low-energy utilization. Systems designed with autonomous local intelligence have increased but require a microcontroller that can run software that takes energy. What emerged from the academic community are open source alternatives such as RISC-V from UC Berkeley that’s gained momentum over the last few years.
(more…)