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First LEON Silicon Tested Successfully
uglomera writes: "LEON, the open-source CPU developed for the European Space Agency, has been successfully manufactured and tested by Atmel on an Atmel ATC35. Gaisler Research, whose CEO Jiri Gaisler wrote the VHDL model of LEON, also offers a real time kernel, simulator, a cross-compiler, etc. for this SPARC-family processor designed for space applications. Check it out." You can find more good information on the LEON processor on the Gaisler site, including diagrams and further reading. Open Source hardware running Free software -- wheee!
I doubt they plan to send this widget up without a full seperate functionality audit, which they can do for an open source processor, but it might be hard to convince say Intel to let them pore over the VHDL for the celeron or whatever.
Just because it's open source doesn't mean they aren't going to put it through the same rigorous tests that they would put a commercial processor through.
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Play Six Pack Man. I
I was speaking to a co-worker the other day about Sun's UltraSPARC III processor and he was telling me about CPU manufacturing in general.
To actually create a fabrication facility to make CPUs, it takes about 20 billion dollars. $20,000,000,000 dollars. That's more than most companies can afford. Even Intel couldn't make very many new fabrication plants.
If a company can't afford to create their own plant, they have to schedule time at a fabrication facility. This is basically a window (say 48 or 72 hours) where the facility will crank out as many chips as possible. If they miss the window for some reason, they have to re-schedule and it can be months until there is another open time slot.
What I'm getting at is designing Open CPUs is a great idea. It allows developers to really get inside of the hardware and optimize the hell out of applications, which is a good thing. However, the actual cost to make these CPUs is staggering, and unless a big company put up some big bucks, I don't see it happening in the near future.
My co-worker also mentioned how low cost almost everything else is. Video cards, NICs, sound cards and the like. Wouldn't it be better to focus on products like these since they would work with all hardware (how about a video card that worked on Sun and x86 machines?)? With Moore's Law getting us faster and faster CPU speeds, perhaps it's time to make the peripherals first, and focus on a CPU once we have found sucess with smaller projects.
negative spin.
LEON
The LEON model also exists in a fault-tolerant
version, capable of detecting and correcting
single-event upset (SEU) errors in any register
or RAM element. This is done completely in
hardware without any software intervention.
The area overhead for the fault-tolerance
functions is approximately 30% while the timing
penalty is around 5%. The fault-tolerant features
makes it possible to use LEON in the severe
space environment without having to develop specific SEU-hardened cell libraries. The LEON
fault-tolerant VHDL model can under some conditions be licensed from ESA -
Ethics II Axiom 2. "Man thinks." B. Spinoza
The availability of an inexpensive, radiation tolerant CPU is a big win for space researchers. Right now there are darn few radiation-tolerant parts available for use in space applications due to decreased demand from the military. The International Space Station is using Intel 386s for embedded CPUs, as they are simple enough to be relatively rad-hard. More modern CPUs, such as in the laptops used on the ISS and Shuttle have about one lockup/day due to radiation.
The design requirements for software controlled systems in space are so stringent that to do anything sophisticated requires incredible redundancy, cross checks among the systems, and increased design complexity, all of which significantly drives up design costs (and causes all kinds of debugging problems). Tell me three times is not enough, you have to tell three controllers three times, three different ways and then they need to cross check. This could be a big step forward for software geeks in space.