Open-V Is the World’s First Open-Source RISC-V MCU

Programming computers, robots, and other varied projects seen on Hackster and elsewhere has benefited immeasurably from the open-source movement. On the other hand, most chips that power these innovations are, for all practical purposes “black boxes.” Instructions are input, and the appropriate electrical responses are generated.

This works great for many applications, but if you would like to “know your hardware down to the transistor level,” now there is a planned solution in the form of OnChip’s Open-V — the world’s first open-source, RISC-V-based 32-bit microcontroller. The chip can run at up to 160MHz, and a dev board has been designed to go along with it.

The Open-V has a host of built-in peripherals you’d expect of any modern microcontroller and was designed to compete with the capabilities of ARM M0-based microcontrollers.

Open-V has SPI, I2C, SDIO and JTAG, as well as UART, GPIO, PWM and JTAG, as well as two 10-bit 10MS/s ADC and two 12-bit DAC channels. There are 16 programmable GPIO pins, too. The OnChip team also notes that they are working on additional peripherals, such as USB 2.0, USB 3.0, internal NVRAM and/or EEPROM, and a convolutional neural network (CNN).

What’s more, the Open-V core is even Arduino-compatible, which means you will benefit from the abundant resources of the Maker community.

Open-V is currently live on Crowd Supply, and all of its files can be found on GitHub. It’s an ambitious project, so be sure to check out their crowdfunding campaign, and perhaps be a part of it!