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Project IceStorm Passes Another Milestone: Building a CPU

Posted by samzenpus on from the building-it-better dept.

beckman101 writes: FPGAs — specialized, high speed chips with large arrays of configurable logic — are usually highly proprietary. Anyone who has used one is familiar with the buggy and node-locked accompanying tools that FPGA manufacturers provide. Project IceStorm aims to change that by reverse-engineering some Lattice FPGAs to produce an open-source toolchain, and today it passed a milestone. The J1 open-source CPU is building under IceStorm, and running on real hardware. The result is a fairly puny microcontroller, but possibly the world's most open one.

2 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Most people won't care by xophos · · Score: 4, Informative

    Forget the future, they are here and they are advertised as features:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

  2. Re:What's special here?? by egladil · · Score: 4, Informative

    What is special is that they are making an open toolchain to program an FPGA and that toolchain is now capable enough to program a working CPU into the FPGA.

    If you had read the entire summary you would have seen that the CPU design they were using was the J1 that you mention.