LowRISC

About LowRISC

Functioning as a pivotal, non-profit entity in the semiconductor landscape, lowRISC C.I.C. provides a neutral, collaborative engineering hub for developing open-source silicon hardware. Originating from the University of Cambridge Computer Lab in 2014, the organization was formally established by Dr. Gavin Ferris, Prof. Robert Mullins, and Dr. Alex Bradbury. Dr. Ferris, now CEO, brought prior entrepreneurial experience from co-founding ventures in digital radio and fintech, while Prof. Mullins and Dr. Bradbury contributed deep academic and technical expertise from the university environment. This unique blend of academic research and commercial discipline underpins the company's operational ethos.

The firm’s business model is structured around a concept it terms the “Silicon Commons®”. This framework facilitates shared investment in foundational silicon technology from a coalition of industry partners. Funding is derived from multi-year commitments, direct engineering contributions, and aligned work-for-hire contracts with major technology players such as Google, Microsoft, Western Digital, and Seagate. This collaborative funding model allows partners to reduce individual R&D costs on pre-competitive technologies and focus resources on their unique product differentiators.

lowRISC's most prominent project is OpenTitan, the world’s first open-source silicon Root of Trust (RoT). Stewarded by lowRISC, OpenTitan was launched in partnership with Google and others in 2018 to create a trustworthy, transparent, and high-quality secure chip design. An RoT provides a fundamental layer of security for hardware, ensuring that a system boots with authentic code and its integrity is maintained. A major milestone was achieved in February 2024, when the OpenTitan project announced its first commercial availability with validated silicon, a culmination of five years of collaborative effort. The initial announced application for this chip is within Google's Chromebooks, replacing a proprietary component.

Beyond OpenTitan, lowRISC maintains other critical open-source IP, including Ibex, a production-quality 32-bit RISC-V CPU core used within OpenTitan and in other projects like Microsoft's CHERIoT-Ibex. By providing permissively licensed, rigorously verified, and well-documented IP blocks, lowRISC effectively lowers the barrier to entry for creating specialized silicon, serving a market of hyperscalers, device manufacturers, and academic institutions that require a high degree of transparency and security in their hardware foundations.