Antmicro at Zephyr Developer Summit 2022: Renode, RISC-V and more

This year’s Zephyr Developer Summit is approaching fast and as a Diamond Sponsor of the event, Antmicro will be bringing the flexibility and cross-platform nature of the open source RTOS into the spotlight. During the event in Mountain View product owners, software and hardware developers as well as architects, will have the chance to see how our years of involvement in the Zephyr ecosystem are now coming together. The developments presented in our keynote address and other sessions include further developments of our massive Zephyr/Renode Dashboard CI system, work related to Zephyr support on RISC-V, real-world AI acceleration products being built with Zephyr and more.

Antmicro and Zephyr at scale

As a long-time and active Platinum member of the Zephyr Project Antmicro has been helping customers adopt Zephyr in real-world products - including across product lines and generations.

An informative illustration of how the cross-platform Zephyr RTOS allows you to work with a wide array of hardware in a standardized way is the Renode Zephyr Dashboard which we will be presenting on Thursday, June 9. The dashboard, announced last year, provides a visual summary of how 130+ Zephyr-compatible platforms can be run in Renode, Antmicro’s open source simulation framework.

The dashboard utilizes structured data from Zephyr and presents the results of a continuous integration (CI) system running real Zephyr binaries on a variety of architectures and devboards. In order to showcase Zephyr’s focus on security and traceability, we leverage Zephyr’s automatic software BOM generation capability to provide SBOM data for the thousands of demos included the dashboard, further highlighting our commitment to standardization.

We have some exciting news about the next generation project built on top of the Zephyr Dashboard, so make sure to join us for our keynote during which we’ll talk about bringing hardware and software together to increase the understanding and traceability of the hardware ecosystem.

Supporting RISC-V and open hardware

When it comes to transparency, security and accountability for next generation products facing new challenges presented by a more connected world, we are participating in some exciting developments brought about by the open hardware movement spearheaded by RISC-V International, which we’re a proud Founding member of. As maintainers of the RISC-V architecture in Zephyr we’ll host a mini-conference dedicated to recent developments and open points around support of RISC-V in Zephyr. Through our work, we are bringing Zephyr closer to organizations like RISC-V and CHIPS Alliance, helping Zephyr become the de-facto standard for open hardware.

FPGA-accelerated real-time AI processing

The configurability of FPGAs makes them an ideal match for Zephyr’s flexible hardware support - in our work with open source FPGA IP, systems and tools, such as CHIPS Alliance’s F4PGA open toolchain initiative, we’ve therefore always pushed for the adoption of Zephyr for FPGA.

Besides the common scenario of getting Zephyr to drive your soft SoC, you can also have it manage an FPGA-accelerated application on SoC FPGA platforms like the RISC-V based PolarFire SoC or Xilinx’ (now AMD’s) UltraScale+. Our other talk during the summit will in fact focus on such an application using the Zephyr RTOS to drive a customizable NVMe AI accelerator platform. The project combines hardware from Western Digital and open source software and FPGA firmware from Antmicro, and enables low-latency ML processing for storage.

Join Antmicro at the Zephyr Developer Summit

Sounds interesting? Join us at the Zephyr Developer Summit in June to find out more about Antmicro, visit our booth and talk to us in person. During this two-day event you’ll have a chance to experience a variety of excellent live talks on various topics, learn about or maybe even shape the future of Zephyr and open hardware. If you think that Zephyr may be a good match for your next generation SoC or product, meet us next month and see how our engineering services - whether it’s hardware development, software porting, CI deployments or simulation-based testing - could help you become part of the vibrant Zephyr ecosystem.