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Western Digital's RISC-V "SweRV" Core Design Released For Free
Western Digital has published a register-transfer level (RTL) design abstraction of its in-house designed SweRV RISC-V core. The SweRV core is one of several RISC-V projects the company as undertaken as part of their effort to spearhead the ISA, its ecosystem, and foster their own transition away from licensed, royalty-charging CPU cores. In accordance with the more open design goals of RISC-V, the publication of the high-level representation of SweTV means that third parties can use it in their own chip designs, which will popularize not only the particular core design, but also the RISC-V architecture in general.
The RTL design abstraction of Western Digital's RISC-V SweRV core is now available at GitHub. The design is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, which is a very permissive (and non-copyleft) license that allows the core to be used free of charge, with or without modifications, and without requiring any modifications to be released in-kind. In fact the requirements of the license are quite slim; besides requiring appropriate attribution, the only other notable restriction is that third party developers cannot use Western Digital's brands to mark their work.
Previously: Western Digital to Transition Consumption of Over One Billion Cores Per Year to RISC-V
Western Digital Unveils RISC-V Controller Design
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @11:37AM (1 child)
Anybody doing RTL to VLSI layouts for fun? We have on-demand PCB fabrication and assembly today, are IC's and microcontrollers next?
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday February 17 2019, @02:51AM
Cool, a free RISC-V core in RTL. Now anyone with their own billion-dollar fab, or with tens of millions of dollars to pay an existing fab, can create their own CPUs.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Saturday February 16 2019, @03:15PM (2 children)
- Someone at ARM must have mightily pissed them off?
- Someone at MIPS then was in deep sleep?
- Someone at WD, up to the bigwigs, must really enjoy designing new things once in a while?
When did corporate America ever come out with open hardware like this? The last time I can think of was with the original Woz designed Apple II. Or could it be that they looked at a few developments about how the storage markets develop and figured out that they'll be bust in 10 years if they just continue with what they are doing? SSD-wise they'd have no chance to source the chips in a way to stay competetive with Samsung and the Chinese, and cloud-storage wise, they'd be run over by Amazon. So they decided they might as well open a new field and become a CPU manufacturer. They'd design the initial RISC-V generation with what they'd save in ARM licenses, spread it freely until RV has enough market share to be credible, and then come out with the high-end designs the market will ask for, having the advantage of being first mover in that field?
Sounds a bit fantastic, but should their numbers show to them that spinning rust will become unfeasible in the near future, they'll need a miracle anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @08:08PM
If the other guys stay with proprietary CPUs, they have a selling point for enterprise customers. Two birds with one stone - no backdoors in the storage controller, no royalties for the chips.
(Score: 2) by EETech1 on Saturday February 16 2019, @11:06PM
You must be new here!
Oh... Wait...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @04:57PM
When they are trying to save every penny on mass storage it makes perfect sense for WD to get rid of any
CPU core royalties.
(Score: 2) by Walzmyn on Sunday February 17 2019, @01:36PM
this was the quote at the bottom of the page as I read this story and comments :
"There is hardly a thing in the world that some man can not make a little worse and sell a little cheaper."
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday February 18 2019, @04:00PM
Western Digital had plans to make something like a billion RISC-V's. Not RISC-V is a royalty-free instruction set architecture, but there is a dearth of royalty-free, mass-produced chip designs. Presumably they have enough of an internal market to design their own RISC-V processor.
So even getting a free register-transfer description of their processor may be something unexpected and welcome.
Whether these chips will be useful as a SOC is another matter. They will certainly be appropriate for hiding inside disk drives.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @08:25PM
way to be, WD!