In July of this year, we announced that QuickLogic would become the first programmable logic vendor to fully embrace an open source development environment. Specifically, we worked with Antmicro to create a fully open-source suite of tools for our QuickFeather development kit, which features our EOS S3 FPGA SoC platform with an embedded Arm® processor.

The environment we created included SymbiFlow for FPGA development, Renode for SoC Emulation, and Zephyr for RTOS support. We felt that the combination of open-source tools and our QuickFeather kit could be useful for a wide variety of applications, but FPGA-enhanced Machine Learning (ML) was one set of applications we had in mind and TinyML was a particular target.

Now QuickLogic and Antmicro are taking another step forward by collaborating on a joint project with Google. The new project involves the development of Renode simulation and open-source FPGA tooling support for OpenHW Group’s Core-V MCU project featuring the CV32E40P RISC-V core alongside QuickLogic’s eFPGA fabric.

This new platform will build on the open-source RISC-V ISA and complement it with an open-source embedded FPGA to create a powerful, highly integrated, extremely flexible, and ultra-low power target for TinyML applications.

By building on the open-source RISC-V ISA and with an open-source FPGA inside, it will be an extremely capable and flexible target for TinyML applications. This new platform can be evaluated in a pre-silicon form via support from Renode which also includes FPGA co-simulation capability.

We recently joined a keynote panel discussion at the RISC-V Summit, moderated by Michael Gielda of Antmicro, to discuss this collaborative effort along with other TinyML advances. Joining us were Tim Ansell from Google and Zephyr’s Kate Stewart.

To learn more about QORC, click here.
To learn more about our RISV-V effort with Antmicro and Google, click here.