lowRISC Expands and Appoints New Members to the Board of Directors from Google and ETH Zurich

LONDON -- May 16, 2019 -- lowRISC C.I.C., the open source system on a chip (SoC) organisation, today announced that Prof. Luca Benini (ETH Zurich), Dominic Rizzo (Google) and Ron Minnich (Google) have joined its board of directors. The announcement coincides with a new phase of hiring by lowRISC with the goal of significantly increasing the size of its Cambridge-based engineering team during 2019.

lowRISC is a not-for-profit, community-driven organisation working to provide a high quality, security-enabling, open SoC base for derivative designs. The organisation is lowering the barrier to producing custom silicon, enabling research and FPGA experimentation, and establishing a vibrant ecosystem around open silicon designs. lowRISC supports a core engineering team who collaborate with industry partners, academic groups, and the wider community to drive the open source silicon ecosystem.

"We are very pleased to welcome new board members from Google and ETH Zurich who share our excitement about the future of open-source hardware. Their commitment will accelerate our roadmap for delivering high-quality open-source system-on-chip designs,” said Alex Bradbury, CTO and co-founder of lowRISC CIC.

lowRISC also revealed that Google are providing support and funding to further their mission and that Prof. Benini's group at ETH Zürich are contributing their Zero-riscy processor core. lowRISC, in collaboration with Prof. Benini’s PULP team and Google, will continue development of the core as “Ibex”.

“I’m delighted to join the lowRISC board. lowRISC plays a key role in the open-source hardware ecosystem, providing engineering resources while maintaining a clear community-focused vision and not-for-profit status. We are excited that they will be able to contribute to the continued development of Zero-riscy and also provide the necessary ongoing support,” said Prof. Benini.

Google engineers Ron Minnich and Dominic Rizzo are long term supporters of open-source. Ron is a well known figure in the High Performance Computing field and inventor of LinuxBIOS, now known as coreboot, the firmware used in all Chromebooks. Dominic leads efforts in open source silicon and security fobs at Google.

"Google believes that open source is good for everyone. To further our commitment, we are investing both capital and engineering resources to create a sustainable open source hardware ecosystem. In addition to engineering resources, lowRISC provides the community stewardship that is vital to this vision,” said Royal Hansen, vice president of Security, Google.

Please visit our jobs page for more information on how lowRISC is expanding our engineering organization.

About lowRISC

lowRISC C.I.C. is a not-for-profit company that aims to demonstrate, promote and support the use of open-source hardware - bringing the benefits of open-source to the hardware world. We are producing high-quality, security-focused, open, and flexible IP. Our expertise includes the LLVM Compiler, novel hardware security extensions and RISC-V tools, hardware and processor design.