At the 39C3 (Chaos Communication Congress) conference, Andrew Huang and Sean Cross, known for designing the open Novena laptop and the platform for creating Precursor smartphones, showcased an open SoC called Baochip-1x. This chip is specifically designed to create secure Internet of Things (IoT) devices and is intended to work in conjunction with the Xous microkernel operating system that Andrew and Sean have been working on for the past five years.
The Baochip-1x chip, along with circuit diagrams, hardware descriptions in Verilog language, a simulator, and design documentation, are all available under an open license called CERN OHL 2.0. The Xous operating system code is written in Rust and distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. The goal behind creating this SoC was to address the lack of a reasonable compromise in the chip market that combines lightweight design with the ability to run secure systems.
Traditional options in the chip market for embedded devices often fall into two extremes – full-featured chips designed to run large platforms using the Linux kernel, and stripped-down chips without memory management units (MMU) which sacrifice security guarantees. Baochip-1x aims to bridge this gap by combining the lightweight nature of ARM microcontrollers with the memory isolation capabilities typically found in full-fledged CPUs.
The SoC Baochip-1x features a 32-bit CPU based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture, along with a quad-core BIO I/O accelerator. It includes support for virtual memory and comes equipped with 2 MB of SRAM and 4 MB of non-volatile RRAM. The first batch of chips is expected to be produced in the second quarter of 2026 at TSMC using the 22nm process technology known as TSMC22ULL.