RISC-V Lagarto is First Open Source Chip Developed in Spain

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insidehpc.com, Dec. 31, 2019 – 

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center has coordinated the manufacture of the first open source chip developed in Spain. Built with TSMC's 65-nanometer transistors, their RISC-V based Lagarto chip a key step in the center's strategy to become a benchmark in the open source hardware technologies' field developed in Europe.

Lagarto is an important step in the search of the BSC, led by the center's director, Mateo Valero, to develop European computing technology. This project is based on the premise that the instruction set of the future processors must be open source to ensure transparency and minimize dependence. ISAs constitute the basic set of machine language instructions that a processor can understand and execute and is, therefore, the meeting point between software and hardware. The fact that they are open is intended to circumvent the possibility of chips incorporating backdoors or instructions that may be detrimental to the security or privacy of users.

Open source hardware is a possibility that has emerged in recent years and has the potential to be as disruptive as Linux was once, an open source software paradigm. If Linux managed to lessen the dependence of users in large companies providing software and software applications, it is envisioned that hardware based on ISAs open source can do the same in their own field.

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