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posted by cmn32480 on Monday January 30 2017, @01:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the less-risc-y dept.

OnChip and SiFive, two groups aiming to develop and release RISC-V platforms, have announced they will collaborate. From OnChip's crowdfunding campaign:

Ever since SiFive's HiFive1 campaign was launched just a week after we launched Open-V back in November, we've both been getting a lot of questions about how we might collaborate. It's taken a while, as these things do, but we finally have a concrete answer we think will benefit everyone, not least the RISC-V community. Here's how we're collaborating:
...
Open-V Will Use the SiFive E31 CPU Coreplex
...
All Open-V Peripherals Will Be Compatible with SiFive Chips
...
SiFive Will Donate Wafer Space in a May 2017 Tapeout
...
OnChip Will Contribute to the Free Chips Project

Sounds like good news for those hoping for RISC-V and open hardware designs to become tangible objects.
Note that the SiFive HiFive1 campaign was successful and has already shipped to some backers while the OnChip OPEN-V campaign looks like it will not reach its goal.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by sgleysti on Monday January 30 2017, @07:00PM

    by sgleysti (56) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 30 2017, @07:00PM (#460746)

    You want to blink an LED in 2030 its gonna take terabytes of IDE and libraries and 50 pages of OS dependent code ... but it'll be in a SOT-23 package and draw nanoamps and cost five cents

    It's not exactly what you were thinking, but the PIC10F322 in a SOT23-6 package is $0.39 to $0.54 depending on quantity.
    http://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/PIC10F322 [microchip.com]

    Not only have I used this chip to PWM an LED and generate various testing waveforms, it's handy for a ton of other things as well. It has an internal oscillator, an ADC, two PWM modules, a configurable logic cell, a complementary waveform generator (great for driving H bridges), a numerically controlled oscillator, and two timers. I taught myself to program microcontrollers from its datasheet and related references. Fun stuff.

    Like you're saying, these things will just get more featureful. However, I doubt that there will ever be a time when you cannot program them in assembler. Arduino is already similar to what you were suggesting about using libraries to make microcontroller programming easier.

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday January 30 2017, @08:32PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 30 2017, @08:32PM (#460774)

    Whoa...

    These new PIC10F32X variants are based on the standard mid-range architecture (vs. the baseline for the PIC10F2XX family)

    I made a little dev kit to play with the 10F2XX series some years ago and I see time marches on! That's quite a featureful little chip you've found there!

    A 555 timer is about the same price now. A couple years back a 10F2XX cost more than a 555 but you could program it and reprogram it and it takes zero passives for a simple timer so arguably it came out ahead. The 10F2XX series being a bit crude and limited its a fair comparison...

    I actually invested in a SMD ZIF socket for my 10F2XX project to make a little dev board thingy and I should see if its pin compatible with the 10F3XX series. Otherwise if you don't use a ZIF socket programmer you have to solder in a PICKIT header so you can program the darn thing.

    I never did anything terribly useful with the 10F I was going to develop a little I2C talker that could squirt out config to something like a DDS oscillator so it kinda held its programming. You can buy COTS kits to do that. Much more elegantly (although larger) than my design. The qrplabs progrock is basically what I was going to make although much smaller of course, and an older generation DDS oscillator, for obvious reasons.

    A lot of the fun of the 10F2XX was simply using the weirdest smallest little microcontroller I had ever used, just because. I could solder together something the size of an altoids tin that contains maybe 50 processors although I have no idea what I'd do with that...

    • (Score: 2) by sgleysti on Monday January 30 2017, @09:19PM

      by sgleysti (56) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 30 2017, @09:19PM (#460794)

      I used microchip's programmer adapter to program the SOT23 chips:
      http://www.microchip.com/Developmenttools/ProductDetails.aspx?PartNO=AC163020 [microchip.com]

      I just looked at the datasheets, and as far as ICSP is concerned, the 10F220/222 have the same pinout as the 10F320/322. I too chose this chip because it was so tiny and inexpensive. Amazing to see what something so small can be used for.

      I'm also really fond of the 12F1571/1572.