[HN Gopher] OpenSourceFPGA Launches Foundation to Accelerate Ado... ___________________________________________________________________ OpenSourceFPGA Launches Foundation to Accelerate Adoption of Programmable Logic Author : lelf Score : 57 points Date : 2021-04-24 14:40 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.businesswire.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.businesswire.com) | corysama wrote: | The MiSTer FPGA project is bringing FPGAs to the attention of a | whole lot of techie hobbyists. I know it's got me thinking about | learning a bit. | daly wrote: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26917890 | pytlicek wrote: | Yeah! Absolutely right and can't agree more. | Zenst wrote: | I do feel Intel if anybody could of pushed FPGA's into consumer | space. Heck even if they added a basic small affair onto their | chips as standard it would open up software and standards. See | you need to software as much as the hardware to drive standards | that get adopted as a standard that is not adopted is a swing | thru the middle of the tree called a swing. | | I hope this pans out well. After all, imagine if your OS could do | a few custom instructions in a FPGA as an OS accelerator, offload | some of the routines not already enshrined into a dedicated | instruction. | | I would also add, there is one avenue that may see this pan well, | if you can do crytomining upon them - that would certainly be a | blessing for all as would get them into mass production, shift | the crypto's away from GPU's and much good would come from it. | That's the optimistic hope how we will get some FPGA's into the | standard CPU/SOC offerings in much the same way the FPU was a | separate chip at one stage in CPU life. | marcodiego wrote: | About 2 decades ago, the micro-controller world was extremely | closed. If you needed an IDE, compiler or debug tool there was no | choice besides ugly proprietary options. Then arduino happened. | | Boards that support Symbiflow are the arduinos of FPGA. | newhouseb wrote: | As someone pretty integrated with open source hardware, this | initiative weirds me out. | | There's a growing community around open source silicon, whether | that means ASICs with Openlane & the Skywater PDK or FPGAs with | Symbiflow or more general cores with the FOSSi Foundation. But as | far as I can tell, none of the folks on the board of OSFPGA are | affiliated with any of that work with the exception of Brian | Faith from QuickLogic (which uses Symbiflow as their first-party | toolchain IIRC). Co-Chairman Naveed Sherwani lead SiFive for a | while and started a bunch of companies/organizations with "Open" | in the name (like OpenFive), but none of these are "open" in any | open-source sense as far as I can tell. | | Further, membership is expensive and representation on the | "board" is determined by the amount of capital you have which | feels antithetical to building an inclusive community where | passionate individuals can contribute (and indeed, much of the | OSS in this space is driven by insanely productive individuals | like Claire Wolf & whitequark). | | Finally, quoting from the press release: | | > The Open Source FPGA Foundation offers a set of free and open | source tools | | But the github is empty except for a singular project that just | links to work done before the formation of this entity? | | So constructive feedback, if you're involved with this | initiative, please reach out to one of the many communities that | already exist: | | - The Skywater Slack | | - The Symbiflow Slack | | - The YosysHQ Slack | | - #openfpga & #symbiflow on freenode | | - The 1BitSquared Discord | adapteva wrote: | Still early days, but I disagree with some of your assertions. | Seems to be a bit of an echo chamber in osh these days... | | The effort was not created in vacuum. | | -The skywater effort sits on top of darpa's openroad (I am | currently on the board and so is serge) | | -Prof Gaillardon and Xifan created the "openfpga" open source | generator and taped out a skywater and 12nm (see woset best | paper) [edit: and they are the founders of osfpga] | | -Vaughn Betz created VTR which symbiflow is based on.[edit: and | he is on the board] | | -Yosys/Claire has done amazing work but it was possble thanks | to Alan Mishchenko's ABC. De Michelli and Gaillardon have | similar package to ABC that is definitely worth a look. | | -The fees seem to be in line with other organizations, chips | alliance, riscv foundation, etc. | newhouseb wrote: | Thanks for connecting the dots! | | I'm familiar with the OpenFPGA stuff but hadn't connected it | to the folks listed -- consider this an ask to have bios on | the site as I evidently picked the wrong people to google. | It's great to know there's more than meets the eye here | beyond a vague press release I can't make heads or tails of. | | Looking at other hardware-related foundations (like the | RISC-V foundation) there are explicit callouts for | "individuals not representing a legal entity," which is where | someone like myself would fit, but the bucketing on OSFPGA | makes it seem like people in this group who are not students | (for example, me, not that I'm particularly special) don't | have a place here. (As an aside, I dislike how many orgs | collapse members and sponsors into one thing, but that's | neither here nor there). | | Finally, I didn't mean to imply that the work I mentioned | came whole cloth from the respective author's heads. Sorry if | what I wrote conveyed that. | | PS: When is Zero ASIC coming out of stealth? :) | adapteva wrote: | Happy to! Looks like the website broke during updates. The | bios used to be there. Hopefully it will be fixed soon. | | Soon... | amirhirsch wrote: | next startup: hosted design entry and CI/CD for FPGA... Every | time Vivado taskbars go back and forth forever I start writing a | Javascript clone of the block designer and scripts to launch | builds on AWS... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-04-25 23:00 UTC)