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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.

1 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. What's special here?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There are plenty of fully open source CPUs around.

    There is a community building CPUs from discrete logic (http://mycpu.selfhost.it/), from transistors (http://www.extremetech.com/computing/128035-how-to-build-an-8-bit-computer-from-scratch) and even from relays (http://www.nablaman.com/relay/).

    There are also Forth CPUs which are freely embeddable into a FPGA (the J1: http://www.excamera.com/sphinx/fpga-j1.html) and which can be purchased now (http://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino/).