RIOS Laboratory and Imagination announce partnership to grow the RISC-V ecosystem

London, England, and Shenzhen, China – 19 August 2020 -- Imagination Technologies and RIOS Laboratory have established a partnership, with Imagination opening up select GPU IP to the RISC-V International Open Source Laboratory (RIOS Lab). The collaboration supports PicoRio™, the first RISC-V development platform released by the RIOS Lab. It will enable the RIOS Lab to build a complete development platform and open-source ecosystem for RISC-V single-board computers.

Zhangxi Tan, Co-Director, RIOS Laboratory, says; “Through the collaboration with Imagination, RIOS Lab will break the monopoly of commercial enterprises in the field of hardware processors. We’re delighted to have Imagination onboard and through further collaborations and the cultivation of talent in semiconductor and information industries, the RIOS Lab will become a significant global contributor of next-generation processors.”

With access to Imagination's IP, future development boards and other products developed by the RIOS Lab will include high-quality GPU display and image processing. Along with the RIOS RISC-V CPU core, memory, and other IP, the product will provide a complete development platform with a suite of open source software.

John Rayfield, Chief Technical Officer, GPU & Compute, Imagination, says; “By collaborating with the RIOS Lab, we’re able to provide a comprehensive GPU solution for those looking to design with the RISC-V architecture, while also supporting the development of an open-source ecosystem. We’re excited to be working with the RIOS Lab and seeing the this ecosystem grow.”

RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture based on the principle of reduced instruction set computing (RISC). The RIOS Lab uses collaborative engineering from both academia and industry to elevate the RISC-V software and hardware ecosystem. It is founded by David Patterson, a Turing Award laureate and world-renowned scientist in the field of computer architecture.

About RIOS Laboratory

With the support of the Shenzhen Municipal Government and Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (TBSI), the RISC-V International Open Source Laboratory (RIOS Lab) was established in 2019. 2019 marked the 40th anniversary of Shenzhen’s opening-up policy for foreign direct investment, and with the name inspired by the Spanish word for “rivers”, the establishment of RIOS Lab symbolizes the flow of information from many sources, coming together to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. RIOS Lab plays an indispensable role at TBSI, it brings the research effort of RISC-V CPU and its software and hardware ecosystems from UC Berkeley to China, it is also the mission for RIOS Lab to provide an open source platform for chip developers around the world with far more economical and efficient technology. See http://rioslab.org

Follow RIOS Lab WeChat official accounts “TBSI RIOS 实验室“

About Imagination Technologies
Imagination is a UK-based company that creates silicon and software intellectual property (IP) designed to give its customers an edge in a competitive global technology market. Its graphics, compute, vision & AI and connectivity technologies enable outstanding power, performance and area (PPA), robust security, fast time-to-market and lower total cost of ownership. Products based on Imagination IP are used by billions of people across the globe in their phones, cars, homes, and workplaces. Imagination Technologies was acquired in 2017 by Canyon Bridge, a global private equity investment fund. See www.imgtec.com.