lowRISC unveils power-packed collaboration with Microsoft

The deal is to help bring the CHERIoT-Ibex design to production grade, leveraging lowRISC’s comprehensive open-source silicon development methodology, the Silicon Commons. Microsoft’s CHERIoT design integrates CHERI’s fine-grained hardware memory security technology within lowRISC’s popular RISC-V microcontroller core Ibex®.

Dr Gavin Ferris, CEO of lowRISC says: “We are delighted to be working with Microsoft to bring CHERIoT-Ibex to the very high quality required for deployment into commercial products.

“This joint effort further demonstrates the success of our Silicon Commons approach to making chip designs radically more transparent and trustworthy.”

CHERI is said to have the potential to prevent around 70 per cent 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 is said to solve 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 per cent 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 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.”