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Help Build the World's First Community-Funded CPU ASIC

Posted by timothy on from the dude-hook-us-up dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The 32-bit OpenRISC CPU has been available for many FPGAs and was turned into a commercial ASIC in 2003. Now, the OpenCores community is asking for donations to create a new ASIC with the OpenRISC CPU, ethernet, PCI, UART, USB and other peripherals. The goal is to be able to sell these ASICs at a low price to anyone who wants to build a cheap embedded system built completely on open source. The OpenRISC currently runs on Linux 2.6.37 and has ports of gcc 4.5.1 among other things."

4 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Free at last by olof_k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is a milestone in open source history. No more complaining about undocumented behaviour that causes drivers to crash. It's just to download the RTL code and see for yourself what is going on. If this catches on, the chances of building truly open systems greatly improves. Go OpenCores!

  2. Isn't SPARC open source? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    http://www.opensparc.net/

    1. Re:Isn't SPARC open source? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Funny

      There used to be a small company that produced the OpenSPARC chips. I can't remember what they were called - Star? Solar? Something like that. Anyway, they were bought by some database company a while ago, and they still make those chips.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  3. Re:OK, I'll Say It by Bryan3000000 · · Score: 4, Informative

    You don't understand. Chip fabricators will fabricate custom designed chips. Many companies have this done. Apple used to do it until they brought it in-house, and they still do for many components. If the design is actually completed and manufacturable, the only limit on price is the quantity of the order. This project can actually do what it intends.