Support Open Hardware!

[maiden]

If you do not know what a FPGA or ASIC is, check wikipedia.


i just got this fancy mail:


HELP US SHOW THE OLD CONSERVATIVE SEMICONDUCTOR INDUSTRY THAT OPEN-SOURCE IS HERE TO STAY AND WILL CHANGE THE INDUSTRY!


Please help us create the "worlds first true open-source OpenRISC ASIC", meaning:


- Build and release all design files as "true" open-source.


- Offer it back to the donors as a super-low cost ASIC.


- Use a "flat price model", meaning that the price-level will be set accordingly based on the accumulated annual volume, which means everyone will benefit if the volumes goes up, not only buyers with high volumes. The more we are, the lower unit-price we will get.


THIS IS WHAT WE WANT TO TRY AND CHANGE, BUT WE NEED YOUR HELP TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN!


Some of us who have worked for Semiconductor companies have seen the large margins and the large price differences depending if you were a large customer with many different products, or if you are a smaller company with a great new product. Since price always is important , it is today almost impossible to compete with large companies even if you have a "better" product.


We are very happy to see that the existing donors are donating quite allot of money per person, however since we are so many members of the OpenCores community (117.000 users), we basically would be well off with a couple of $ per person. What we are trying to say is that all donations counts and matter allot!


Since we do not know yet what ASIC-technology we can afford, the current design specification is "not set in stone". We want the community and donors to provide feedback when we have better indication on what ASIC technology we can use. The ASIC technology selection defines both how much logic (functionality) and what performance we can get, which then impacts what functions we can/should integrate, for example, it would be great if we can integrate multiple OpenRISC processors, PCIexpress etc.


HELP US MAKE THIS WORK, AND SHOW THE OLD CONSERVATIVE SEMICONDUCTOR INDUSTRY THAT OPEN-SOURCE IS HERE TO STAY AND WILL CHANGE THE INDUSTRY!


http://opencores.org/donation

 

[TrashyMG]

ASIC stands for Application Specific Integrated Circuit, generally it's a customized computer chip built for one purpose.. My guess is they're trying to create a fully open hardware ASIC with a RISC based processor core.


ASICs are generally created with certain IP that's not open. Generally companies that sell ASICS have certain cores, like a USB core,High speed serial port core,PCI express core, etc... they get information from the customer what they need and build a custom chip with the available cores they have, generally how the cores are build isn't fully shared, just how they function..


I'm happen to be a Test Analysis Engineer dealing with ASICS and custom logic chips for the company I work for.

 

[maiden]

Introduction


The design goal is to present a Linux enabled SoC design. The design will be based on open


source IP available from OpenCores. Emphasis will be on performance and connectivity.


Design is centered around the popular OpenRISC, a 32 bit general purpose RISC processor.


This processor comes with bleeding edge Linux and GCC support and does also incorporte a


JTAG debug interface.


System bus is a Wishbone B3 compatible implementation supporting simultaneuos open


channels and multiple clock domains. This will enable high throughput for memory intensive


functions such as diplay controller and Gigabit Ethernet.


External functions can easily be added over PCI or via a small pin count interface. In this


way the design could be adopted to a large vriety of uses.


more detailed info about the chip can be found here: http://cdn.opencores.org/pdf/or1k-asic.pdf

 

[Asiyura]

Nice project, I hope you'll be able to make it real!


I gave you a really tiny amount, that's all I could afford, but as you said, even the smallest donation count.

Keep going!

 

[Granitehead]

I would give a little amount if I didn't had to borrow a paypal account for it. That's a pain and I won't do it for as little as the couple of $ I would have given - if I only saw this threads before paying the ext connectors, then I could have payed both.


I thought about making a PayPal account a lot of times, although I actually can't (am not allowed to) because I'm less than 18 years old, but putting the money on it would still be a pain and I don't know what they would do if they found out...

 

[Sychone]

Donated.