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tonyPick [blogspot.co.uk] writes:

An article at Hackerboards is reporting the announcement that fabless semiconductor company SiFive has announced the first embedded SoCs based on the open source RISC-V platform [hackerboards.com]

A VC-backed startup closely associated with the RISC-V project announced the first system-on-chip implementations of the open source RISC-V processor platform. At the RISC-V 4thWorkshop at MIT this week, SiFive announced two embedded SoC families. The Freedom Unleashed family debuts with a 28nm fabricated, Freedom U500 SoC with up to eight 1.6GHz cores that runs Linux, aimed at machine learning, storage, and networking applications. The MCU-like Freedom Everywhere family for Internet of Things starts with a 180nm Freedom E300 model that runs FreeRTOS.

Like RISC-V, both designs are fully open source, but the company also plans to sell finished SoCs with the help of fabrication partner TSMC. The platform will “reverse the industry’s prohibitively rising licensing, design and implementation costs,” says SiFive.

Although the SiFive [sifive.com] announcement talks about the final SoC implementation currently only targets based on standard FPGA based development platforms [sifive.com] appear to be available.

This earlier SN article contains more information on the RiscV project [soylentnews.org] and the development of an open Instruction Set Architecture [riscv.org].

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