Sourceforge + Hardware = OpenH?

dantes wrote to us about OpenH.org which is a new site focusing on open hardware, and references for hardware. Good idea - it's just starting out, but the references and designs will make life easier for open source drivers, as well as working with new systems. My only caveat is that when I read OpenH, I thought about a methadone replacement, but that might just be me.

Comments

Device driver shift

[Fervent]

Will this mean that stuff like the PCMCIA libraries will be moved out of the kernel area (regular sourceforge) and into the appropriate area? Sourceforce and anything hardware ought to be completely separate.

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Carmack is an elitist, pseudonerd bastard.

Sounds good, but...

[snellac]

To reproduce a hardware design, unlike software, is not within the capability of the average individual. It requires a large initial investment in time, and money to set up a production run for something. However, there are some rather interesting properties of solid-state electronics that are very similar to software. Like software, hardware requires a large investment of time and resources to design, and a small percentage to distribute. Creation a new design of a silicon chip, such as the Pentium processor, RAM, or any of the support chips on a computer requires a great deal of money and resources. First, an idea must be developed into a design, and then the design must be verified and tested. Then, after that, a great deal of resources will be put into setting up a production line to produce the design. These two steps require anywhere from 75% to 95% of the total resources involved in developing a new chip. Once the design is in production, the incremental cost of making another chip (from raw materials and running the production line itself) is extremely small. Semiconductor makers are effectively "printing money" after they have recouped their initial investment. This is why hardware and software are similiar: the incremental cost of distributing both is very small.

The role the organization I want to create would play would be to act as a focal point for the the exchange of information, and would profit by taking the best ideas and turning them into real and marketable products. Instead of having my organization go through the first step of design, I would encourage entities and stake holders outside my organization to do the design phase of the process. This way, the end customer is intimately involved in how my products turn out in a way that no current company in the high tech industry can match. By doing this, I will eliminate several of the major risk areas in high technology. No one has a better idea of what they actually want than the customers, and if they have a stake in the design of a product, they will be much more likely to buy it than if they did not. My customers for my hardware products will be my suppliers for my 'intellectual property'. I just hope that this OpenH stuff succeeds.

OpenCores

[Anonymous Coward]

www.opencores.org

Slashdot in the past...

[DanThe1Man]

This old slashdot story should make an interesting read. Its shows what people thought of this strange 'open hardware' idea three years ago.

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I was working on a flat tax proposal and I accidentally proved there's no god.

Think forward, past silicon

[osgeek]

Open Sourcing some hardware designs now is a good idea, and a good way to begin building up a knowledge base while working out the inevitable technical kinks such a system will encounter.

Currently, it may seem that this knowledge base won't get much use, since most people don't have access to the specialty design, testing, and fabrication equipment needed to really crank out sophisticated circuit boards.

Before too long, though, you'll be able to print circuits with polymers on polymer substrates with modified ink-jet printers.

When that happens, we'll see a tremendous explosion in this segment of the industry, and Open Source will already be there.

Chip economics 101 ....

[taniwha]

First, an idea must be developed into a design, and then the design must be verified and tested. Then, after that, a great deal of resources will be put into setting up a production line to produce the design. These two steps require anywhere from 75% to 95% of the total resources involved in developing a new chip. Once the design is in production, the incremental cost of making another chip (from raw materials and running the production line itself) is extremely small.

This is certainly true for small production runs (ie under say 100k parts) design costs and tapeout NRE dominate - and it's true - those 2 things do cost the bulk of developing a new chip (because those 2 things basicly are 'developing a new chip') - but for really large production runs you care about yield, wafer cost, testing and packaging - to a first estimate:

cost per die = cost per wafer/(dies per wafer * yield)
cost per chip = cost per die + package cost

testing cost is a little harder to figure in since some of it is done for diesort and some after packaging (where you have to include all the bad packages you toss away). Yield is also highly proportional to dies/wafer - if you have 10 random defects on a wafer then if you are pulling 1000 small dies off of the wafer you're likely to get a 99.9% yield - but with 10 dies per wafer you might get a 10% yield if you are lucky.

How you do actually accounting of the NRE depends a lot on your business model - but for a lot of companies who are using an outside fab it's it's more likely to be tossed in on top of the packaged chip cost along with things like profit and marketting costs.

Back to the original point - if you spent $5M of engineer costs and NRE to develop a chip that costs $20 packaged and you are selling 10 Million of them you only need to add 50c on top of the packaged chip cost - this is chicken feed next to the package itself which might cost you anything from $1-5. On the other hand if you are selling 10k chips you have to amortize your R&D at $500/chip ....... and unless you have one of those military contracts for hammers your boss will probably be having his head handed to him on a plate by senior management ....