Open-Source Processors

clay pigeon writes "This EE Times article covers the development of open-source processors. No doubt exciting news for hardware hackers and those with a need to know about every last detail of their systems, but how will this effect the hardware industry? Can open-source hardware duplicate the success of the open-source software movement?" I'm not holding my breath. Fabrication facilities are a lot more expensive then a CD-ROM presses (or more accurately, internet connections). But I still hope it happens. It would be an interesting market if everyone worked together on the designs, but built their own chips.

Comments

Verilog (Cish), VHDL (adaish)

[taniwha]

As other have pointed out the bulk of most large chips these days are designed in high-level languages (Verilog, and to a lesser extent VHDL) which look a lot like existing programming languages.

You can learn either language relatively quickly if you know some other programming langauages - but using them for logic design does require a grounding in hardware that's outside of normal programming experience (wires, low level concurrency etc etc) - and converting a working simulation into a physical device requires a lot more infrastructure than most people have on hand ....

Re:Yeah but, chip making isn't as easy as writing

[regen]

There are no higher language equivalents like Perl or VB for chip making, it's just tedious gate and run after gate and run.

Um....no.

There are many high level design languages for chip design, VHDL and simulators for testing designs prior to fab.

Designed chips is very much like programing.

I'm disappointed

[Zarquon]

in the responses posted here so far. Most of the people seem to be whining about how much fab facilities cost, and how developing software is so much easier. Nobody talks about how much presses (both CD and Tree) cost, because we transmit our programs over the internet and run them on our own computers.

Nobody seems to know about the equivalent for hardware: Designs written in a Hardware Description language such as Verilog or VHDL can be worked on as a group. When you want to test it, you download it to an FPGA. Complete development kits including software and a protoboard can be had from Altera or Xylinx for a few hundred dollars (less if you are a student). If you make a mistake, fix your VHDL and recompile.

Also, people fail to consider that the designs for this type of thing rarely are on the level of AMD or Intel. We don't make 22 million-transistor designs, but if you want a custom hardware accelerator (say, an Ogg Vorbis accelerator, or hardware accelerated encryption where you KNOW EXACTLY what it is doing. No NSA backdoors. No worry about getting specs from OEMs.) this is the way to go about it. If your project gets popular, you can get them made in quantity as ASICs from any number of companies.

Please, people, look into these things before you start flaming a project like this.

Last thing I want to do...

[SpanishInquisition]

... is to have to recompile my CPU each time there is an upgrade.

It is becoming very possible!!!

[stomer]

As I have tried to post twice, MIT Tech Review has an article regarding the ability to use an inkjet printer to print a semiconductor chip.

It is a very interesting read and even speaks to the possibility of this allowing open source cpu's in the future. Imagine, downloading and printing the latest version of your cpu before upgrading to the n.n kernel it is targeted at :)

The speed is not yet that of a Pentium, but the researcher believes it will be someday. Wish /. would not have rejected this twice, never understood why!