2016 was a great year for Open Hardware. The Open Source Hardware Association released their certification program, and late in the year, a fe pleasew silicon wizards met in Mountain View to show off the latest happenings in the RISC-V instruction set architecture.
The RISC-V ISA is completely unlike any other computer architecture. Nearly every other chip you’ll find out there, from the 8051s in embedded controllers, 6502s found in millions of toys, to AVR, PIC, and whatever Intel is working on are closed-source designs. You cannot study these chips, you cannot manufacture these chips, and if you want to use one of these chips, your list of suppliers is dependent on who has a licensing agreement with who.
Read more at Hackaday
