risc-v News - Page 45 of 52 - CNX Software

November 7, 2019November 11, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 145 Comments

Giveaway Week – Maixduino Sipeed M1 RISC-V AI Kit

For the fourth day of Giveaway Week, I’ll give out a kit comprised of Maixduino a RISC-V development board with an AI accelerator in Arduino form factor, a camera, and a 2.4″ color LCD. I tested the Maixduino kit with MicroPython, but it can also be programmed with the Arduino IDE, or Kendryte SDK. It basically allows you to run low-power AI workloads at the edge, i.e. without access to the cloud, such as face detection. To enter the draw simply leave a comment below. Other rules are as follows: Only one entry per contest. I will filter out entries with the same IP and/or email address. Contests are open for 48 hours starting at 10 am (Bangkok time) every day. Comments will be closed after 48 hours. If comments are open, the contest is still going on. Winners will be selected with random.org and announced in the comments section […]

October 28, 2019October 29, 2019 by Ayo Ayibiowu - No Comments

Another GD32 RISC-V Development Kit with LCD By Seeed Studio

Recently we highlighted the $5 Longan Nano, a development kit released by Sipeed for the Gigadevice GD32V RISC-V family of microcontrollers. The Sipeed Longan Nano is powered by the GigaDevice’s GD32VF103CBT6, based on Nucleisys Bumblebee kernel (support RV32IMAC instruction sets and ECLIC rapid interrupt). Seeed Studio is currently on this quest for expanding the Gigadevice GD32V RISC-V ecosystem with the launch of the SeeedStudio GD32 RISC-V kit with LCD. The Seeed Studio development kit is based on the SeeedStudio GD32 RISC-V Dev Board and a 2.8 inch 240×320 pixel resistive LCD screen. The Seeed Studio GD32 RISC-V Dev Board is based on the 32-bit general-purpose GD32VF103VBT6 MCU, which can run at up to 108MHz. It comes with a 128KB on-chip Flash memory, and a 32KB SRAM memory. The development board comes with a total of 80 GPIOs, an onboard 8MB Flash and 256 Byte EEPROM, a staggering amount resources for this […]

October 26, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 10 Comments

SiFive U8-Series Out-of-Order RISC-V Core IP Takes on Arm Cortex-A72 Core

Earlier this week, we wrote about SiFive Shield open security platform as the equivalent of Arm TrustZone security technology, but the company had had another important announcement this week with the introduction of SiFive U8-Series Out-of-Order (OoO) RISC-V Core IP with much higher performance than the company’s earlier U7-series core and competing with Arm Cortex A72 core. At first, the company will offer two standard cores with SiFive U84 RISC-V core optimized for power efficiency and area efficiency, and the SiFive U87 RISC-V core with vector processing. SiFive U84 Performance & Efficiency We do not have much information about U87, but SiFive already published some interesting details about U84 cores. SiFive U84 core offers about 3.1 times higher performance compared to their earlier U74 standard core thanks to a 2.3x increase in IPC combined with a 1.4x increase in maximum frequency. Compared to SiFive U54, U84 delivers 5.3x higher performance […]

October 24, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

SiFive Shield is an Open Security Platform for RISC-V Processors

Most Arm processors and Armv8-M microcontrollers support Arm TrustZone security with hardware-enforced isolation built into the CPU. But so far, I had not read anything about equivalent solutions for RISC-V processors. It turns out Hex-Five’s MultiZone security is one of the RISC-V hardware-security providing an answer to Arm TrustZone, and besides checking out the presentation slides, you can also watch the video filmed at RISC-V Workshop Taiwan last March. But what brought me to write about RISC-V security is SiFive announcement for their Shield open security platform for RISC-V processors SiFive Shield Overview SiFive Shield is an open, scalable security platform designed for RISC-V processors. It supports root-of-trust, customizations, and offers per-memory protected memory regions and multi-core privilege modes. Combined with SiFive WorldGuard, SiFive Shield enables greater isolation. SiFive WorldGuard Isolation SiFive WorldGuard is a fine-grain security model for isolated code execution and data protection. It offers core-driven and process-id […]

October 4, 2019October 4, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Wio Lite RISC-V WiFi Board with ESP8266 Module Launches for $6.9

Released this summer, GigaDevice GD32V generated a lot of buzz, as a cheap general-purpose 32-bit RISC-V MCU, and soon after the $5 Longan Nano development board with LCD display and enclosure was launched to the market. However, many applications benefit or require some network connectivity with WiFi. Espressif Systems is a founding member of the RISC-V Foundation, so RISC-V WiSoCs (Wireless SoCs) are coming, but AFAIK none of those are available yet. In the meantime, Seeed Studio has launched Wio Lite RISC-V board which brings WiFi connectivity to GD32V MCU through an ESP8266 WiFi module. Wio Lite specifications: MCU – Gigadevice GD32VF103CBT6 RISC-V (rv32imac) microcontroller @ 108 MHz with 128KB Flash, 32KB SRAM Wireless Module – ESP8266 WiFi Wio Core with 802.11b/g/n/ WiFi 4 connectivity Storage – MicroSD card slot USB – 1x USB Type-C port for power and programming Expansion – I/O headers for GD32 MCU, I/O header for […]

October 3, 2019October 3, 2019 by Siji Sunny - 5 Comments

PicoLibC is a Lightweight C library for Embedded Systems

Well-known developer, Keith Packard has recently announced the launch of “picolibc” through his blog. Picolibc is a C Library for embedded systems which is suitable for small micro-controllers, and this standard C library API’s allows to run even in low memory (RAM) devices. This is an upgraded version of “newlib-nano” with few interesting changes which includes replacement of “stdio” lib with ATMEL-specific printf code adopted from avrlibc. As part of this library, Keith also launched picocrt, which is responsible for initializing memory and invoking various constructors before calling its own C program, the main function. Features picolibc is a revised version of newlibc, without full-fledged stdio lib and uses lightweight stdio lib from avrlibc, which is more suitable to low memory embedded devices. Meson build-system eases the build process of picolibc source tree for various target platform and hardware. Updated the math test suite to use Glibc as a reference […]

September 16, 2019November 25, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Linux 5.3 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 5.3: So we’ve had a fairly quiet last week, but I think it was good that we ended up having that extra week and the final rc8. Even if the reason for that extra week was my travel schedule rather than any pending issues, we ended up having a few good fixes come in, including some for some bad btrfs behavior. Yeah, there’s some unnecessary noise in there too (like the speling fixes), but we also had several last-minute reverts for things that caused issues. One _particularly_ last-minute revert is the top-most commit (ignoring the version change itself) done just before the release, and while it’s very annoying, it’s perhaps also instructive. What’s instructive about it is that I reverted a commit that wasn’t actually buggy. In fact, it was doing exactly what it set out to do, and did it […]

August 29, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 36 Comments

$5 Longan Nano GD32V RISC-V Development Board Comes with LCD Display and Enclosure

There’s been some exciting news about RISC-V microcontrollers recently with Gigadevice announcing GD32V, one of the first RISC-V general-purpose microcontrollers, which outperforms its Arm Cortex-M3 equivalent in terms of performance and power consumption. The company also announced some development boards, but they are not quite that easy to purchase being listed on Tmall website in China. The good news is that Sipeed has introduced Longan Nano development board powered by GD32VF103CBT6 microcontroller, and it’s up for sale on Seeed Studio for $4.9. Longan Nano board specifications: MCU – Gigadevice GD32VF103CBT6 32-bit RISC-V (rv32imac) microcontroller @ 108 MHz with 128KB Flash, 32KB SRAM Storage – MicroSD card slot Display – 0.96″ 160×80 IPS RGB LCD connected via SPI USB – 1x USB Type-C port for power and programming Expansion – 2x 16 through holes (2.54mm pitch) exposing 3x USART, 2x I2C, 3x SPI, 2x I2S, 2x CAN, 1x USBFS (OTG), 2x […]