[HN Gopher] OpenSourceFPGA Launches Foundation to Accelerate Ado...
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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...
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