The CORE-V MCU DevKit from OpenHW Group is a fully open design with a RISC-V core and an eFPGA.

The RISC-V-based dev kit, shown at Embedded World, has an Espressif Wi-Fi module enabling AWS IoT ExpressLink connectivity.

The OpenHW Group, a non-profit organization founded to stimulate collaboration in the field of free and open-source silicon, has launched a RISC-V-based development kit with Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT ExpressLink compatibility – all open source, of course.

"The enormous potential of IoT applications necessitates new ways of thinking about design, and the open-source community is delivering hardware, software, and development tools to accelerate innovation," says Rick O'Connor, president, and CEO of OpenHW Group, in the announcement made today at Embedded World. "Seeing such a unified worldwide collaborative engineering effort to provide open source building blocks allowing integrated MCU designs is extremely exciting."

The MCU CORE-V The OpenHW Group DevKit package is powered by the CORE-V RISC-V-based microcontroller, which is constructed on the GlobalFoundries 22FDX manufacturing node. Inside the device is a 32-bit in-order four-stage CV32E40P RISC-V processor based on the RI5CY core of the Parallel Ultra Low Power (PULP) Platform, as well as an ArcticPro embedded field-programmable gate array (eFPGA) from QuickLogic, developed for accelerating AI and machine learning workloads.

The chip is housed on a small development board that includes a USB Type-C port for power, data, and debugging, as well as JTAG for additional debugging, a mikroBUS expansion socket, a Raspberry Pi-style 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, an onboard I2C temperature sensor, and an Espressif Wi-Fi module.

With the platform's support for AWS IoT ExpressLink, the latter comes into its own. The OpenHW Group is showing the development kit at Embedded World with a weather station emulation workload — connecting with many devices across the world using Amazon Web Services as a back-end.

The OpenHW Group has not yet finalized the price or precise shipment date for the CORE-V MCU DevKit, which will be available for pre-order on GroupGets soon, with the campaign page ready to receive email addresses for launch notice. The design files for the DevKit PCB are available on GitHub under the permissive Solderpad Hardware License 2.0.

Meanwhile, those anxious to get started might use Imperas' riscvOVPsimCOREV simulator to begin software development.