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Announcing RISC-V International’s Expanded Developer Boards Program | RISC-V International

The RISC-V Developer Boards program drives RISC-V innovation by making development boards more accessible to the global RISC-V community. Read on to learn how the program now works and how you can get a free RISC-V board. We’d also like to give a special thank you to our members who are contributing boards and making this program possible: Allwinner Technology, DeepComputing, Microchip, SiFive, StarFive, T-Head (Alibaba Group),  Xcalibyte and more.

Since kicking off the RISC-V Developer Boards program, we’ve given away 163 boards. Those boards were split between academic projects, individual projects, and operating system communities. Thank you to the members who participated in the initial program: Allwinner Technology, Antmicro, Alibaba Cloud, BeagleBoard, Microsemi, RIOS, SiFive, and StarFive.

RISC-V International and RISC-V vendor members are investing in this project by purchasing and donating boards to make them available to the open source community. RISC-V International will identify recipients, match them with the type of boards they need, and oversee the distribution through members. Recipients will submit a plan of usage and be required to document their results using the board. In addition, many RISC-V members are running their own independent programs and coordinating with RISC-V International.

We’re looking for participants working on projects that:

  • Have clear upstream community impact – contributing patches, testing, or documentation
  • Are proposed by proven open source software contributors
  • Impact future RISC-V products and markets
  • Conform to the footprints of current or near immediate developer board hardware
  • Come from RISC-V members who are active in our communities

Even if your project doesn’t meet all of these criteria, feel free to apply. Just keep in mind that the more requirements a project can check off, the greater your chance of receiving a free dev board.

Want a free board? Want to help? Read on!

We encourage RISC-V enthusiasts of all stripes to participate, whether you’re an early adopter, new engineer, senior architect, student, or professor. Dev boards are a great way for hardware and software developers, open source maintainers, and many other folks to innovate with RISC-V. We especially encourage those who want advanced access to hardware, prior to software availability, to participate. 

We encourage everyone to share your RISC-V projects – whether or not you’re participating in the RISC-V Developer Boards program – with us on Twitter @risc_v and LinkedIn. We can’t wait to see what you create! 

See the terms of the program here. If you have any questions, reach out to dev-boards@riscv.org.  

Are you a board vendor? Join the program now!

We’re always looking to expand the program and make more boards available to the fast-growing RISC-V community. If you’re a RISC-V member and have a board for the program, complete our RISC-V Developer Boards Partnership form to start the ball rolling.

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