EE Times has an article on the launch of the RISC-V Foundation at the third RISC-V workshop.  ASPIRE Lab members, Google, HP, and Oracle, are among the founding members of the Foundation, and the event will be hosted at Oracle’s site in Redwood Shores.

A multi-university team led by Vladimir Stojanović and Krste Asanović has demonstrated the world’s first microprocessor that can use light to communicate with the external world.  This chip was fabricated in a foundry using a standard CMOS process, and features the RISC-V open instruction set architecture developed in the ASPIRE lab, together with photonic I/O for more energy-efficient data transmission.  A paper covering this major technical achievement will appear in print tomorrow in the journal Nature.