OpenCores rides again in the RISC-V era

Europe's scientific community is helping to support a portal for access to free-to-use open-source cores with financial assistance for the OpenCores organization.

With the emergence of RISC-V in 2016 and 2017 open source hardware became a hot topic once again and a startup called Oliscience BV (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) was formed in 2017 to look after the OpenCores website and community. As a result, OpenCores, which was originally founded in 1999, is embarking on its third phase of ownership and is planning to emerge from a quiet period that lasted for several years.

In 2017, with support from Nikhef, the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics, Andrea Borga, a digital designer at the Nikhef electronics technology department, and colleagues, acquired ownership of the OpenCores website, control of the various files and formed Oliscience. The amount paid to previous owners for OpenCores has not been disclosed.

Oliscience is a contraction of open logic interconnects science, which reflects the company's origins in Europe's scientific community. The company's formation also reflects the fact that scientific researchers are frequent users of free IP cores and that they did not want to see OpenCores atrophy or disappear.

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