In March 2019, CHIPS Alliance was formed as a project under the Linux Foundation. The four founding members – Esperanto, Google, SiFive and Western Digital – set the aspirations for the group. CHIPS Alliance can be viewed as an extension of the mission started by organizations such as RISC-V International. RISC-V defines an open instruction set architecture (ISA) specification which paved the way for a plethora of open cores and CPU implementations, but does not instruct how to make the physical hardware and other building blocks needed to create practical open silicon. This is where CHIPS Alliance begins. Using open standards such as RISC-V, CHIPS Alliance is working to collaboratively build robust and industry-proven cores, peripherals and SoCs.
Early on it became clear that lowering the barriers and cost of development would require collaboration among many parties to develop relevant open source design tools. CHIPS Alliance stepped up to the task. Today the organization focuses on both open source hardware RTL designs and open source software and hardware design tool development. CHIPS Alliance is a barrier free, open organization promoting open silicon.
CHIPS Alliance has grown to more than 25 members over the past year. The organization now boasts some of the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturers including Intel, Samsung, Futurewei and Alibaba. Software tools, IP and services companies in the organization include Antmicro, Codasip, Imperas, Qamcom and Verisilicon. Several notable universities and open source projects are also part of CHIPS Alliance such as UC Berkeley, IIT Madras, Yale University, OpenRoad, Munich University of Applied Sciences and UC San Diego. The complete membership list can be found at https://chipsalliance.org/about/members/