The much awaited 8th RISC‑V Workshop in Barcelona is approaching fast - and as the first event of this kind to be held this side of the Atlantic it will serve as a great opportunity for European stakeholders to witness the disruptive impact of the RISC‑V movement first-hand. From May 7th to 10th, 2018, Universitat Poletècnica de Catalunya and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center will be welcoming members of the RISC‑V Foundation and leading industry representatives.

In time for the Workshop, Antmicro has just announced upgrading its Founding Membership to Platinum, which is a step reflecting our company’s clear commitment to becoming a driving force of the RISC‑V ecosystem.

We are also happy to say that Antmicro will be giving a talk on "Simulating heterogeneous multi-node 32-bit and 64-bit RISC‑V systems running Linux and Zephyr with the open source Renode framework", hosted on Day 1 (Tuesday, May 8th, 2018), 2:45 PM at the UPC venue.

Michael Gielda, VP Business Development at Antmicro elaborates: "Thanks to its extensibility, Renode is already used by several members of the [RISC‑V] Foundation for PoCs, performance analyses and prototyping, and the availability of a 64-bit platform will enable a wider adoption among RISC‑V developers."

What is more, the complex multi-node setup which is the subject of the talk will be presented at a dedicated demo stand during the evening reception, together with another equally complex RISC‑V project to be unveiled at the Workshop - be sure to seek Antmicro out in the exhibition hall!

Expanding the Renode environment to become the tool of choice for RISC‑V developers has recently been recognized by Microsemi who have announced their strategic collaboration with Antmicro and has been sponsoring the introduction of Mi-V support in our open source framework platform as well as support for the Linux-capable 64-bit SiFive U54 platform as presented at the upcoming workshop.

With Antmicro becoming the official maintainer of RISC‑V in the Zephyr Project and plans to use the tool for testing both the Zephyr and Contiki-NG RTOSs, Renode is also developing rapidly on the IoT front. Presented at the JFokus 2018 event and the Swedish RISE ICT Open House innovation session, the 1.3 release of Renode included a sample multinode setup with Zephyr, as well as important new developments such as the EmulationEnvironment - a mechanism to handle sensor data in a centralized way. Other features included a 64-bit version of the framework available for macOS.

The upcoming Renode 1.4 will feature - as already mentioned - support for 64-bit RISC‑V targets, SiFive’s Freedom E310, Microsemi’s Mi-V, a range of Silicon Labs platforms (added in collaboration with the RIOT OS community) and a new time framework to offer strict control over time progression and the performance of emulated targets, which is possibly going to be the biggest release to date.

As with every RISC‑V Workshop, we are looking forward to welcome RISC‑V leaders and enthusiasts in Barcelona next week.