It's time again to do one of those yearly retrospectives. Am I early being unusally early this year since the year hasn't even ended yet? Actually.... this one is for 2024. I was supposed to to it in January but...well... life happened. Anyway, this should be fine, right? It's still 2025 so it's still a retrospective of last year. Aiming to keep this one a bit shorter to release it before the bells ring.
SERV
2024 was an action-packed year for the award-winning SERV, the world's smallest RISC-V CPU. A new version, 1.3, was released, and thanks to a collaboration with Harvard and Pragmatic Semiconductors, SERV became the first ever fully programmable general purpose CPU implemented on printed electronics. The resulting article was published in Nature and can be found here.
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| Being published in Nature is nice and all, but you really know you made it when your Nature article is picked up by PC Gamer |
The first steps were also taken this year to make wider and faster versions of SERV called QERV and HERV which was presented as a fancy poster at the European RISC-V Summit in Munich.
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| Extra proud of the little pockets for holding stickers at the bottom of the poster |
During Latch-Up at MIT in Cambridge (which is totally not Boston), I also did the first-ever presentation of the SERV-based benchmarking project CoreScore as a lightning talk. I also had the luck to win a slot on the seventh TinyTapeout....tapeout which I used as an opportunity to create Underserved, yet another SERV-based SoC with even tighter resource requirements than usual.
FuseSoC & Edalize
Both FuseSoC and Edalize saw massive improvements over 2024. At Latch-Up in Cambridge (which is definitely not Boston) I did the first-ever dedicated presentation on Edalize, rather than sneaking it in as a part of a FuseSoC presentation. There was definitely enough things to talk about to fill a whole presentation. The new Flow API is shaping up nicely and more tool backends and flows are being ported over from the legacy API. There's also a whole bunch of things in the work that I won't bore you with here. Just watch the video instead. It's probably still boring but at least it's moving pictures instead of text which I hear all the kids prefer today.
I did a presentation of FuseSoC during ORConf, called the future of FuseSoC, some of which is now the past of FuseSoC and present of FuseSoC since we now live in the future relative to when the presentation was made. ORConf this year was a bit special since it was held in my old hometown and my old university. Amazing that they still let me in there, come to think of it. As always, ORConf was a lot of fun and an opportunity to meet old and new friends and learn about things.
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| Color-coordinated FOSSi fashionistas |
So, was that all that happened in 2024? Not really, but as I mentioned initially, it's already slightly delayed so let's stop here. And you know what? Why don't you tell me what I missed? Happy to make updates. Still got nine days to go. Have a great 2025. I'm sure it can't be worse than 2024.
