Open Everything: Driving Open Standards and Open Source at Western Digital

Richard New, Ph.D., Vice President of Research, discusses Western Digital’s approach to open standards and open source. Since storage performance and TCO are increasingly determined by system design, Western Digital is working with other companies and projects to drive open standards. The company is working to implement Zoned Storage in the Linux storage software stack, enabling improvements for both HDD and SSD. Western Digital is also working to develop and promote the RISC-V open instruction set architecture, a broad industry initiative with more than 150 member companies. The CHIPS Alliance is working to develop open hardware for interfaces, processors, and systems, including the SweRV CPU core. Western Digital is also a founding partner of OpenTitan, an open source project developing silicon root of trust chips. OmniXtend is a low-cost open-source hardware reference design for large shared-memory systems.