Industry Expert Blogs

At the RISC-V conference late last year, one of the keynotes was by Linton Salmon titled A Perspective on the Role of Open-Source IP in Government Electronic Systems. It was not specifically about RISC-V, although the RISC-V ISA and many of the implementations to date (but not all) are open source.

Linton started giving a little of his background. He is a Program Manager at DARPA/MTO. These program managers are people pulled from academia or industry to work for the government for a few years. His background is in both. He was a professor in EE and physics at BYU and Case-Western and then had 15 years in different executive positions directing R&D at GF, TI, and AMD. He was even a member of the steering committee on the first ITRS. He calls himself "middle-aged" meaning that he has been in his government position for three years. The institutional memory is all in the contractors, the program managers are all "temporary".