CHIPS Alliance announces technical milestones, three new workgroups including Chisel and the 3rd Chisel Community Conference

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 7, 2019 — CHIPS Alliance, the leading consortium advancing common, open hardware for interfaces, processors and systems, today announced the creation of Interconnects, Rocket and Chisel workgroups. In addition, a November verification workshop in Munich and a Chisel conference in January will be held giving engineers an opportunity to learn about open source development efforts in CHIPS Alliance. Lastly, the CHIPS Alliance toolchain and cores workgroups have made contributions to open source development tools.

CHIPS Alliance is the project hosted by the Linux Foundation to foster a collaborative environment to accelerate the creation and deployment of open SoCs, peripherals and software tools for use in mobile, computing, consumer electronics, and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The CHIPS Alliance project develops high-quality open source Register Transfer Level (RTL) code and software development tools relevant to the design of open source CPUs, RISC-V-based SoCs, and complex peripherals for Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and custom silicon.

The Open Source Design Verification Workshop in Munich is being held on November 14th and 15th. CHIPS Alliance is hosting the third Chisel Community Conference to be held on January 29-30th in Milpitas, CA. Chisel is a hardware-construction language, hosted in Scala, and is used in both academia and industry to generate RTL for digital hardware. The Chisel community is joining CHIPS Alliance to further accelerate the development of open source hardware and software. Call for papers is open now.

CHIPS Alliance has also formed three new workgroups, Interconnects, Rocket and Chisel. The Interconnects group will further develop OmniXtendTM and TileLink. These groups will begin work imminently to make key contributions to open development tools and hardware. Go to www.chipsalliance.org to learn more or join a workgroup. In addition, the Cores and Toolchain workgroups have completed the following milestones

• Created a portable SoC based on the SweRV CoreTM EH1 using FuseSoC
  • Includes debug port and Zephyr support
• Verilator, the open-source simulator, is extended to add CMake and Python support for Cocotb
• Verilator project for SystemVerilog kicked off

“The rest of the developer team and I are very excited for Chisel to move to its new home in CHIPS Alliance. Now with open-source industry backing, Chisel is primed to continue growing its user base, adding new features, and stabilizing its infrastructure and ecosystem for industry applications.” – Adam Izraelevitz, PhD candidate at UC Berkeley and a lead developer of the Chisel ecosystem.

“We want to personally thank Olof Kindgren, Wilson Snyder and Stefan Wallentowitz for their key contribution to open source software development. These extraordinary individuals were vital to achieving these milestones. We look forward to further participation in CHIPS Alliance to facilitate the adoption of open architectures,” said Dr. Zvonimir Bandić, Chairman, CHIPS Alliance, and senior director of next-generation platforms architecture at Western Digital.

“Antmicro firmly believes in CHIPS Alliance’s vision of fully open tools and workflows as a foundation of an open ecosystem.”, said Michael Gielda, Chair of Marketing, CHIPS Alliance, VP Business Development at Antmicro, “Our work with open source simulation and verification, as well as production-grade SystemVerilog support in open source tooling relies on a collaborative environment where common milestones can be achieved faster.”

About the CHIPS Alliance

The CHIPS Alliance is an organization which develops and hosts high-quality, open source hardware code (IP cores), interconnect IP (physical and logical protocols), and open source software development tools for design, verification, and more. The main aim is to provide a barrier-free collaborative environment, to lower the cost of developing IP and tools for hardware development. The CHIPS Alliance is hosted by the Linux Foundation. For more information, visit chipsalliance.org.

About the Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation was founded in 2000 and has since become the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Today, the Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and its projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure, including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more. The Linux Foundation focuses on employing best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, visit linuxfoundation.org.