CAMBRIDGE, United Kingdom, June 20, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- lowRISC C.I.C.
(https://lowrisc.org/), the open silicon ecosystem organization, today announced
a formal collaboration with Microsoft to help bring its CHERIoT-Ibex design to
production grade, leveraging lowRISC's comprehensive open-source silicon
development methodology, the Silicon Commons.
"We are delighted to be working with Microsoft to bring CHERIoT-Ibex to the very
high quality required for deployment into commercial products," said Dr. Gavin
Ferris, CEO of lowRISC. "This joint effort further demonstrates the success of
our Silicon Commons approach to making chip designs radically more transparent
and trustworthy."
Microsoft's CHERIoT design integrates CHERI's fine-grained hardware memory
security technology within lowRISC's popular RISC-V microcontroller core
Ibex(®).
CHERI has the potential to prevent around 70% of current exploits without
requiring legacy software to be completely re-coded, yet to date it has been out
of reach for many critical applications where power, memory and cost are at a
premium - such as IoT, Operational Technology and embedded systems. CHERIoT-Ibex
solves this problem, being a 32-bit implementation which - when coupled with the
open-source CHERIoT-RTOS operating system - imposes almost no speed penalty and
only 5-10% overhead in power and area in comparison with lowRISC's 'standard'
Ibex(®) core.
By working together to create a comprehensive design verification (DV) suite for
this groundbreaking IP, the collaboration between Microsoft and lowRISC
announced today will allow companies to confidently deploy the core in
commercial products.
"This is truly important foundational work, as it will help make CHERIoT-Ibex
the world's first production grade, open-source CHERI-enabled microcontroller
core," said Tony Chen, Partner Security Architect at Microsoft. "We're looking
forward to seeing it broadly leveraged in commercial designs, bringing much-
needed hardware security - in an efficient manner - to a broad swathe of
critical applications."
About lowRISC(®)
Founded in 2014 at the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science
and Technology, lowRISC is a not-for-profit company/CIC that provides a neutral
home for collaborative engineering to develop and maintain open-source silicon
designs and tools for the long term. The lowRISC not-for-profit structure
combined with full-stack engineering capabilities in-house enables the hosting
and management of high-quality projects like OpenTitan via the Silicon Commons
approach.
Media Contacts:
lowRISC@w2comm.com (mailto:lowRISC@w2comm.com)
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