The lack of a secure, flexible, high performance, and silicon-proven open source base for SoC designs holds back innovation and rate-of-progress in the semiconductor industry. The not-for-profit lowRISC project aims to rectify this, building on the open RISC-V instruction set architecture and exploring ideas on improving security via tagged memory and increasing flexibility through the addition of RISC-V 'Minion' cores to implement soft peripherals. Put simply, lowRISC aims to become the Linux of the hardware world. This talk will give an update on our efforts and our path to first silicon and low cost development boards (Raspberry Pi for grownups!), including how the open source community at large can get involved.

While the potential advantages of open-source software have been clearly demonstrated, the benefits remain untapped in the semiconductor industry. We believe there are significant gains in promoting the open development of hardware without imposing restrictions on its modification or use. Today, it would be almost inconceivable to start work on a large software project without building on an existing open-source base. lowRISC and the wider open-source hardware movement will have succeeded when the same can be said of new projects in the semiconductor industry.

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