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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."

2 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/