mithro
Joined 13 years ago
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56
Submissions
34
Member since
Mar 15
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/mithro; my proof: https://keybase.io/mithro/sigs/AmlQd61sWT2E2O4RUyU6dZL9I2Haky9TOXjBEhJylBM ]
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Comment · 2 months ago
There are a number of efforts to make low volume production of compatible parts - see https://github.com/rejunity/z80-open-silicon
There are also FPGA emulated versions.
Comment · 2 months ago
Hackerfab.org is a bunch of people trying to create a reproducible version of Sam's work.
Comment · 3 months ago
Comment · 3 months ago
The design was taped out on the first wafer.space run (see https://github.com/wafer-space/ws-run1) but I have not heard if it actually worked or not.
Comment · 1 year ago
wafer.space has just opened our first pooled manufacturing run of GF180MCU with the purchase deadline of 28th Nov 2025.
Think of it like OHS Park for silicon!
You provide a 20mm2 design in the open source GF180MCU technology and you get back 1,000 parts. You can used an existing template or build something completely yourself with either open source or proprietary tooling (no required pad ring or management CPU).
Comment · 1 year ago
Things like my https://wafer.space ($7k USD), TinyTapeout.com (<$200 USD) and ChipFoundry.io (~$15k USD) are making it much cheaper to do IC design.
There are a huge number of designs from Tiny Tapeout which are all public - see https://tinytapeout.com/runs/
The designs are still more in the MCU size, but you have to start somewhere!
The Google open MPW program also had 10 runs with 40 projects published at http://foss-eda-tools.googlesource.com/third_party/shuttle/ -- All the submissions had to be open source and there were 1000+ of those. I did try pitching to multiple Google Research groups that continuing the open MPW funding would grow the available designs which have been manufactured and that was useful for AI training but didn't get any bites.
The now defunct Efabless also ran a number of challenges in this space which got pretty good results, see https://efabless.com/challenges
Comment · 1 year ago
There is plenty of updates on the website at https://theopenroadproject.org/ - Including a pretty good report on what happened in 2024.
Also take a look at the Open Source EDA BOF from the DAC conference - https://open-source-eda-birds-of-a-feather.github.io/
Comment · 2 years ago
The team at Antmicro put together this pretty cool visualisation flow for this stuff using only open source tools -> https://antmicro.com/blog/2023/11/open-source-signal-integri...
Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
I also have a general offer to send people who contribute to the open source FPGA tooling and ecosystem free Fomu boards.
Comment · 3 years ago
The Tomu family also has;
- The Fomu (FPGA Tomu) - https://fomu.im/ and https://workshop.fomu.im/
- The Qomu (ARM+eFPGA Tomu) - https://tomu.im/qomu.html
- The Somu (Secure Tomu) - https://www.crowdsupply.com/solokeys/somu
The Fomu is also a great RISC-V MCU prototyping platform.
Comment · 4 years ago
I afraid I don't recall the status of DSP blocks in the open source toolchains for Xilinx hardware. Even if the basics are supported I'm sure there are plenty of DSP features that are not.
Many configurations of VexRISCV work fine without using the DSP blocks (and has been working for 2+ years), so not sure that is relevant.
Comment · 4 years ago
I have a Google Doc at <https://j.mp/softcpus-on-fpgas> which includes a bunch of information about what type of performance has been achieved on modern Xilinx FPGAs.
You can generally do quite a bit of parallelism, see the quad-core LiteX+VexRISCV solution at <https://antmicro.com/blog/2020/05/multicore-vex-in-litex/>.
Comment · 4 years ago
The open source toolchain doesn't quite support the PCIe interface yet but all the other stuff should work in theory.
The best place to see what works is the F4PGA examples documentation at <https://f4pga-examples.readthedocs.io/en/latest/building-exa...>.
If you want to start with fully open source tools on a Xilinx 7 series FPGA the best option is the Digilent Arty A35T board <https://digilent.com/shop/arty-a7-artix-7-fpga-development-b...>.