Open Source: It's Not Just for Software Anymore

Find the Latest SoC Solutions
for... Automotive... IoT... Security... Audio... Video

By Kevin Krewell, irias Research
EETimes (February 02, 2021)

“Open Source” has multiple meanings in the context of hardware designs: an open specification, open/free design files/RTL, designs with expired patent/copyright protection, designs that were dumped when the sponsor decided to discontinue support—otherwise known as abandonware.

As such, the value of open-source hardware varies. Many original open-source hardware projects were small, with limited impact on the chip design business. While it is not the first open-source hardware project, probably the best-known and the one that has had he biggest impact on the industry is RISC-V (pronounced “risk five”).

RISC-V changed the game.

The open-source chip effort started as an academic project at University of California at Berkley, the same institution that produced the first reduced instruction set computer (RISC) CPU: the RISC-1. Among the architecture’s founders was David Patterson, who wrote the seminal research paper on RISC. RISC-1 went on to become the Sun Micro SPARC processor. In the 1980s, RISC illustrated how viable companies could be built around a new processor architecture.

Click here to read more ...

 Back