lowRISC and Microsoft Collaborate to Help Bring the Revolutionary CHERIoT-Ibex Core to Production Grade
June 20 2024 - 6:30AM
lowRISC and Microsoft Collaborate to Help Bring the Revolutionary
CHERIoT-Ibex Core to Production Grade
lowRISC C.I.C., 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.
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Contacts: lowRISC@w2comm.com