Here are the nominees for Best in Show at the 2023 RISC-V Summit North America. 

BeagleBoard.org released its BeagleV-Fire SBC employing Microchip’s PolarFire MPFS025T FCVG484E 5x core RISC-V System on Chip (SoC) with innovative FPGA fabric. The solution comes in a small footprint with flexible I/Os that make it ideal for applications including IoT, robotics, and AI. The BeagleV-Fire is delivered with pre-installed Ubuntu for Linux compatibility.

BeagleBoard.org is now delivery its BeagleV-Ahead single board computer (SBC) based on the TH1520, a quad core 64-bit RISC-V SoC from T-Head. The SBC utilizes the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA).

The BeagleBoard.org Foundation continues to roll out new platforms. The latest, BeaglePlay, is what the group is calling the most adaptable open-source performance platform available. It’s built on the organization’s proven open-source Linux approach and has a feature set that includes built-in wired and wireless connectivity and the ability to connect to a host of sensor and prototyping systems with a range of options and interfaces.

Linux computing made simple and fun with 1,000s of available off-the-shelf sensors, actuators, indicators and connectivity options over mikroBUS, Grove, and QWIIC connections, a TI Sitara AM625 system-on-chip with 1.4GHz quad-core Arm Cortex-A53, PRU and M4 microcontrollers, Gigabit Ethernet, full-size HDMI, USB, 5GHz, 2.4GHz and sub-1GHz wireless, and single-pair Ethernet with power-over-data-line. Camera and touchscreen display ribbon-cable connectors also included. No breadboarding expertise needed to expand this system, just connect, power, and leverage the massive ecosystem of Linux drivers. Utilize BeagleConnect® technology over the sub-1GHz IEEE 802.15.4 wireless network to a BeagleConnect® Freedom up to 1km away.

Rather than an endgame, AI has become a starting point for many developers today. Like any type of engineering, you can start out with simple AI projects that run on basic embedded systems. But, like any type of engineering, the complexity can ramp up quickly. So can the complexity of underlying platforms.

Winners have been chosen based on a 15-point rubric that considers solutions’ Design Excellence (5 points), Relative Performance (5 points), and Market Impact/Disruption (5 points).