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Own An Open Source RISC-V Microcontroller (crowdsupply.com)
"Did you ever think it would be great if hardware was open to the transistor level, not just the chip level?" writes hamster_nz, pointing to a new Crowd Supply campaign for the OnChip Open-V microcontroller, "a completely free (as in freedom) and open source 32-bit microcontroller based on the RISC-V architecture." hamster_nz writes:
With a completely open instruction-set architecture and no license fees for the CPU design, the RISC-V architecture is well positioned to take the crown as the 'go to' design for anybody needing a 32-bit in their silicon, and Open-V are crowd-sourcing their funding for an initial manufacturing run of 70,000 chips, offering options from a single chip to a seat in the design review process. This project is shaping up to be a milestone for the coming Open Source Silicon revolution, and they are literally offering a seat at the table. Even if you don't end up backing the project, it makes for very interesting reading.
Their crowdfunding page argues "If you love hacking on embedded controllers, breaking down closed-source barriers, having the freedom to learn how things work even down to the transistor level, or have dreamed of spinning your own silicon, then this campaign is for you."
Their crowdfunding page argues "If you love hacking on embedded controllers, breaking down closed-source barriers, having the freedom to learn how things work even down to the transistor level, or have dreamed of spinning your own silicon, then this campaign is for you."
Thanks, EditorDavid, for the welcomed break in leftist propaganda posts that don't matter to nerds.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
If you want hardware open to the transistor level and not just the microcode level, just use an FPGA. Actually FPGA is gate level, not transistor level but still is a lot closer than microcode.
why bother with an actual chip? there are plenty of open source microcontrollers you can use today with any number of FPGAs.
I love RISC-V, I really do but $50 for a chip in bad package is too much. Who can hand solder QFN chips?! $20 is really my limit for a chip of that caliber and it would need to at least be in a QFP package.
The reason stated for the QFN package was to achieve clock higher frequencies (160MHz) but really, 50MHz is enough.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
We have had various efforts on open sourced hardware over the years, and they have never made any kind of sense. Verification quality have been spotty and poorly documented, tools have been missing or underdeveloped. This have lead to that any effort in trying to use these design teams would have to invest significant effort in understanding and fixing issues in the deliverables. Contrast with just picking up a license from ARM. Arm will support you fix issues and have a reasonably good track record in delivering on time and at sufficient quality. (And yes you do get the RTL source code so you can inspect it, but you are not allowed to modify it)
Considering that mask sets cost significant money compared to license costs, there is very little interest in picking up these open hardware licenses.
Furthermore their approach to nvram seems a bit eh.. cavalier.
NVRAMs are incredibly hard to do I do not buy that you can develop a brand new reliable NVRAM bitcell without at least 4-5 mask sets for your learning cycles and 3-4 years working closely with the fab to tweak the process.
Oh and b.t.w. on CMOS NVRAM want to know a reason why those guys are so tight lipped: It largely does not work. (Sure you get to it to work in the lab, but expose it to a bit of temperature and aging and they fail miserably)
My personal view is that most western societies seem to be on a trajectory of ever closed groups, while the hardware we live on seems to be becoming more and more open.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
This will get really fun the day someone manages to make an CPU on his own garage.
I hope this person documents it on the net with videos etc..
In addition to RISC-V, the other big project to create an open source processor is the J-core project (http://www.j-core.org). The two projects have very different approaches. RISC-V is an entirely new instruction set that requires an entirely new software toolchain. In contrast, J-core is based on an existing instruction set with an established software toolchain, but some work is required to bring that toolchain up-to-date. RISC-V is supported by large corporations such as Google, HP Enterprise, IBM, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Oracle. In contrast, J-core is much more a grass-roots project.
It will be interesting to see if either project (or both!) succeed in creating a widely-available open source processor. Right now, both projects are aiming at the level of microcontrollers, but both projects have full-featured processors on their roadmaps.
... and a sea story:
A fairy tale starts with, "Once upon a time ... "
A sea story; "Hey, this ain't no shit ... "
So, this ain't no shit:
When I trained on electronics in this man's Navy in 1965, I went to NAS Memphis and we worked on a vacuum tube computer that filled up a whole wall. We'd open the windows in the winter because it was HOT in there.
There were two tubes per flip-flop module. The tubes burned out often and we'd have to troubleshoot that.
Our goal was to use a row of toggle switches to turn lights "on" for a binary one, and "off" for a binary zero.
We would load up one register with four bits and the only other register with four bits and then we'd press a switch that could only execute an add and we'd better get the right binary number on the third row of lights.
We started (I shit you not) all of our algebra, trig, geometry, etc. including square root extraction by pencil and paper and then moved into the slide rule age.
The only goddam transistors we saw were the 9-volt radios playing Elvis.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
You have to wait little of a year to get the board. Also it is not specified on what node (i.e. namometer) it is made.
Tech news on neo-slashdot? I’m shocked.
"It used to be the case that the computer you bought came with schematics and" This is just as wrong. Insofar as the percentage of the population that bought these computers was vanishingly small, instead of ubiquitously large. Apples and Oranges. Different day and age and world. There was never a time that ordinary people purchases such things. It's a nice fantasy though, I'll give you that.
The high speed is because they currently don't have any on-chip flash (flash being slower to access than SRAM, and typically being what slows 32-bit microcontrollers down). That means this isn't a single-chip solution like most microcontrollers, though they are working on changing that.
Instead of flash, they store their program in the same SRAM used to store data (which makes that 8 kB of SRAM a lot more limiting than it would be on a Cortex M0 with the same amount of SRAM plus 16-256 kB flash). Most microcontrollers use a Harvard architecture with separate program and data memory, allowing instructions to be fetched from flash while performing reads from and writes to SRAM. If they don't do this, I wonder what sort of performance they'll see when they have to make regular reads from a slow flash memory in between SRAM accesses. Or will they just load the entire program into SRAM? That's not going to be ideal in terms of power consumption, requiring a much bigger memory array than they'd otherwise use, something that's going to get worse as they try to compete with larger microcontrollers.
Also, the Harvard architecture has some advantages in security: things can be set up so a very specific sequence of actions has to be performed to enable writing to program memory. With IoT devices, this sort of thing is becoming more important...not an issue at present, with their 8 kB memory, but something to consider when thinking about this thing's future.
Analyzing the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture â" Andreas Olofsson, August 2014
Why the fuck does everybody insist on these crowdfunds being for microcontroller chips, rather than a Pi SoC package, or AMRISC20000 (Cyrix 486SL with memory controller PCI bus and almost full set of PC compatible peripheral controllers)?
SPI is out of patent protection, SDRAM is out of patent protection, PCI is out of patent protection.
For 500k and that many units they should be able to produce a chip in a 144+ QFP package that could actually be used to *RUN A SYSTEM WITH LINUX OFF OF*!!!
Instead they are producing something that anyone who actually needs can buy for a dime a dozen (even a RISC-V one!) from already established vendors. I mean seriously, who wants to buy a RISC-V to use with 8k of SRAM and no external memory bus? I can find a dozen other much better ships for that usecase, but it's been 7 years since I could find one that met the PC goals of security, reliability and user control and ownership of its operating characteristics.
AMD, Intel, and ARM are all getting further from the user's control of the system, and all we're getting as we near the decade mark is 'expensive microcontrollers' as seed projects.