Background

Continuing advances in semiconductor technology support the construction of ever more capable silicon chips. This has driven many of the recent advances in computer science, artificial intelligence and the growing importance of digital technologies. The lowRISC project started within the Department of Computer Science and Technology in 2014 and was subsequently spun out as a not-for-profit community interest company (C.I.C). It has grown from 3 people and currently employs 30 people in the UK, Switzerland, Canada, Portugal and the U.S. Its goal is to help make open source silicon a reality and ultimately become as ubiquitous as open source software. lowRISC explores how best to develop open hardware designs and they have been refining a collaborative development framework called the “Silicon Commons”. This innovative workflow merges open source software development best practices with an industrial-strength, chip-design methodology, and it enables the creation of reusable, high-quality silicon IP by a diverse coalition of corporate and academic partners. 

lowRISC’s flagship project OpenTitan, chartered in 2018, is the world’s first open source silicon root-of-trust (RoT) design and most active collaborative silicon design project. A RoT anchors security at the lowest level in a computer system. It has both logical and physical security protections and it is designed to counter attempts to extract secret information. It stores secret keys, provides accelerated and secure cryptographic functions and maintains the integrity of the system below the operating system level.

Function

lowRISC offers a home for multi-partner projects that produce verified, high-quality hardware designs, documentation, and tools. lowRISC is also a full-stack engineering company and makes significant contributions to the projects it helps to deliver.

Target user

Industry and the broader open source community in need of high-quality hardware designs and tools. It also provides academia access to industrial-quality designs for research and aids the transfer of ideas between academia and industry. It has already been the basis of numerous papers that evaluate new security tools and defenses from a range of different academic groups.

Comparison to other technologies

lowRISC supports and maintains projects as an independent not-for-profit organization. It maintains a strictly enforced governance framework, exhaustive documentation, shared test and development infrastructure and a collaborative development workflow. Companies support lowRISC in order to help deliver complex open source projects. They benefit by sharing costs, a framework for collaboration and ongoing maintenance and support.

Delivering open source hardware is challenging and historically has not been undertaken at the scale, or had the impact, of open source software projects. This has partly been due to the resources needed to fund complex multi-year development and produce high-quality designs. lowRISC has worked hard to develop a viable business model in order to work at the necessary scale. In addition, there has been a very clear focus on delivery, governance structures and process, high-quality documentation and training, industrial-quality design verification (DV) and ensuring the existence of a fully-open repository. These have all proved to be key in ensuring the project is capable of delivering complex projects while maintaining the highest standards in terms of quality and correctness. Designs are also carefully designed to be modular and can be reconfigured as required for discrete designs or on-chip (integrated) uses or completely different applications.