Linux on Open Source Hardware with Open Source chip design
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:22
hardware with open source chip design. Who here in the audience uses Linux? Please, a short sign of hands. Feels like almost a hundred percent, I would say. Okay. A hundred percent of people use Linux. So, who of you uses it on open hardware? Please, another show of hands. Yeah, that's not too many. Who of you would like to use it on open
00:45
hardware? And I guess that's why you're here. So, I'm glad that we have Drew Fustini here, our new speaker. He's an open source hardware designer and embedded Linux developer and also the Vice President of the Open Source Hardware Association. And who better to tell
01:01
you how to run your Linux on open source hardware? Please welcome Drew with a big warm round of applause and have fun with this talk. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'll skip past my introduction. It's Congress, so probably most people are familiar with open source. So, before I jump into what open source hardware is, just wanted to frame
01:23
it in the context if people aren't familiar with what open source is. So, examples that are Linux. Apparently, everyone's running Linux in this room, which is great. Underneath Android, there's Linux as well. LibreOffice, which I use to make this presentation is also open source. Firefox, the web browser is open source. So, we're probably all very
01:41
familiar with open source software. And open source refers to something that you can modify and share because the design is publicly accessible. So, with software, we're talking about that you can inspect and modify and enhance the source code. So, in the terms of when we talk about open source, there's a couple different terms that people use.
02:02
They might use free or Libre or open source. And those do have different philosophical backgrounds. For the purposes of this talk, I'm going to conflate those terms and I'm just going to refer to it as open source hardware. Though some people use the terms free hardware, Libre hardware, open hardware. But I'm just going to be using the term open source hardware for this talk. So, open source hardware is hardware
02:24
whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make and sell the design or hardware based on the design. So, this is a definition that we came up with about ten years ago at an event called the Open Hardware Summit.
02:40
People that were making hardware projects, we got together and tried to come up with the definition of what we wanted it to mean. So, I mostly do electronics, though open hardware and open source hardware is more than just that. It can be a mechanical design. Basically any physical object where you have design files that you could share. But just to give you an example, in the context of electronics, what we're talking
03:03
about is the schematic, the board layout, and then the bill of materials, the parts list. And we're not just talking about an output file like a PDF or a graphic file of the schematic or Gerbers for the board layout. We're talking about the editable source file from the CAD software. So, something like Eagle
03:23
or KiCAD. And then one of the things that's good to do with the bill of materials is if you want to enable other people to be able to bill your project, it's good to make sure that the components are available in low quantity. This isn't a strict requirement of the definition of open source hardware, but if
03:41
you want people to be able to build your project, then it's important to make sure that they can build it in low quantities. So, how many people have heard of Arduino? Okay, a good number of people in the room. So, Arduino was a microcontroller board that was created at a small school in Italy like over 10 years ago. And it became super popular because it was good
04:06
enough at the time to do a lot of different interactive electronics projects. And they shared the hardware design and the code on the Internet. And it just kind of achieved critical mass. A lot of people took it and modified it for different projects, different use cases.
04:21
At the beginning, I had a link there to the slides. Also, if you pull up the talk page, there's a link to the slides as well. I have a lot of links in these slides. One thing that's interesting is there was a documentary back when Arduino was starting about the team. I just wanted to check out to see what things were like when that was starting. So, one of the most popular
04:41
Arduino boards is the UNO, which you see a picture of there. So, how do we know that the UNO is open source hardware? Well, if we go to the Arduino website, we can see that the design files from Eagle, which is the CAD software they use, is there. And we can download that zip file, and it has the schematic and the board layout. Now, when we're releasing our
05:01
design files for a hardware project, we need to choose a license. And there's a lot of different options when it comes to licenses. One is the Creative Commons suite of licenses. So, one common one you might see people use is CCBY, means attribution, and then share-alike, SA. One thing
05:20
to note is if you add the non-commercial attribute, then that makes it not open source. In the slides, there's a link to a good blog post that explains why if you add a non-commercial clause, it no longer conforms to the definition of open source. Other people use things like copyleft licenses or reciprocal licenses like GPL, also
05:42
permissive licenses like Apache and BSD, MIT. And then there's licenses that were created specifically for hardware projects, one of which is the CERN open hardware license, which I want to talk more about specifically. So CERN, the physics laboratory here in Europe, they have an open hardware repository. So they're developing these electronics.
06:02
And actually, there was two great talks here at Congress from a couple of electronics engineers that work on the electronics there. So they're building electronics for their physics experiments, and they want to share that with other labs around the world. So they have an open hardware repository. And as part of that, they created the open hardware license. And to give some background on this, one of the
06:23
people that runs the team there is Javier Serrano. He gave a cool interview that's linked in the slides where he talks about their motivation behind this and why they have the open hardware repository and created the license. Though this can get kind of confusing, there's not just licenses. There's also copyright and patents. At the Open
06:42
Hardware Summit a few years ago, Ari Douglas gave a nice talk about this. So you can find that talk in the link there in the slides. He goes over what might be good for your project, depending on what purposes you're trying to achieve with your own project, and kind of goes over a lot of the different options there. But what's the whole
07:04
point of all this? So the reason you might want to make your project open source hardware is that you want to enable collaborative development. So we're talking about the idea here is that you're going to share your design files, and you're hoping other people will help contribute to your project, contribute to the design of your hardware. So I would say that's like the main reason
07:23
to release the design files for your project as open source hardware. If you're not interested in other people collaborating on your project, then it might not be the right thing for your project. So it's good to consider whether or not you want to have other people contribute to your project. So I mentioned, or it was
07:43
mentioned at the beginning, I'm part of the Open Source Hardware Association. So we're a nonprofit based in the US. But though we do have board members around the world, we have Matthias, who's one of our board members in Vienna. I'm actually based in Berlin now, as well. So one of the things we do is we host the definition of
08:03
what open source hardware is. We also have things like best practices guide, a checklist that you can go through to see if you're releasing all the things you need to for an open source hardware project. But the main thing that we do is we help organize this event called the Open Harbor Summit. And that's going to be
08:21
coming up in March of 2020 in New York City. So hope to see some of you there, if you can make it. This will be our 10th one. So we started in 2010. This year, though, we decided to do something a little bit different. So we had Open Harbor Month. The idea with this is we wanted to have people from around the world do locally
08:41
organized meetups and talks and workshops. That kicked off with one in some in Vienna and Colorado in the US. And it was really cool. We had 40 events in 14 different countries. And we'll be doing it again in 2020. So hopefully some of you can get involved with events wherever you're located. And if you're wondering what
09:03
happens at the Open Harbor Summit, you can check out the talks from our last one, which was in 2018, to give you an idea of what happens there. And kind of some insight into the different sorts of projects people are doing. I do a lot of electronics, but there's a lot more than that. There's people that are doing science and art and design, all sorts of different things. One of the other things we
09:24
do at the Open Source Harbor Association is we have a certification program. So this is a self-certification program. You go to certificate.oshawa.org, and you fill out the name of your project, the license you're using, link to your design files, link to your documentation, and then you get this logo that you can use. And
09:44
kind of one of the value of this, if you're making a project, is you can put that on your packaging, or I put it on the silkscreen on my board, so then people can really easily identify that it's open hardware. And then they can go to that website, and they can type in the ID number and be able to pull up the page that links
10:02
them to the documentation, the design files. And then for people that are looking for, like, I want a certain type of device, and I want to find one that's open source hardware, if you see this logo, you can go and look that up in the database and find out more about it. So if you're interested to know more about the
10:22
Open Source Hardware Association, you can go to Oshawa.org. You can join as a member of the association. We also have a mailing list and a forum. If you want to check us out on Twitter, the OHSummit is the open hardware summit account. We have a lot of activity going on right now about that because it's coming up in
10:41
March. And our executive director, Alicia Gibb, who's one of the people that started this summit, she wrote a book called Building Open Source Hardware, and it has essays from different people that have built open hardware projects. So it's a good thing to check out if you're wanting to see what different experiences people have with that. So the point of all of the
11:02
main theme of this talk was about Linux on open source hardware, which is my two favorite things. So one of my favorite projects was developed by Bunny, who gave an awesome talk on the first day here at Congress, and Sean Cross, who's giving a workshop right now on the FOMU. So
11:21
this was a completely open source laptop for everything, including all the electronics were open source. And at the time when this came out, like four or five years ago, it was a pretty decent system. I have one, and I used it for many years. So this was a really cool idea of having a laptop that I can use every day that's open hardware. And it had some cool features like an FPGA and a software
11:42
fine radio. And then if you're wondering what's kind of coming up next, if you go to the CDC area here at Congress, you can see the reform laptop. So Lucas from M&T is there. He has this. It's a completely open source
12:00
hardware laptop. The electronics, the mechanical design, everything. So I recommend you go check that out. It's really cool. It's in the CDC area, which is the critical decentralized cluster. So one of the other things I'm involved with is beagleboard.org. So we're a nonprofit organization that helps design open hardware
12:21
computers. That is everything for people from makers to students to even professionals that are designing into their projects. And what we do is we work with different manufacturers, and we also work with the community to come up with designs that are useful. So this started off with the Beagleboard back in 2008. So this was
12:42
kind of the first low-cost ARM development board. And back at that time, a lot of people were needing ARM hardware to port their free software and open source software to ARM. And the board was pretty popular for that. We followed it up with a littler board called the BeagleBone, which fits into the Altoids tin, if you've
13:02
seen those mint tins. If you've probably used the BeagleBone, you're probably most familiar with the BeagleBone plaque, which was, I would say, still our most popular board. So kind of the theme here is because it's open source hardware, there's a whole bunch of different BeagleBones made by different manufacturers with different features and different price
13:21
points, like Seed Studio decided probably most people don't care about HDMI, so they took the HDMI off to save some cost. Aero wanted to make one that worked with industrial temp, so it's a little bit more expensive, but it has industrial temp components on it. And then one of the things that's important with open source
13:42
hardware is we want people to be able to take the design files and make derivatives. So we have this smaller one called the Pocket Beagle. And the cool thing about this is it's a pretty simple circuit board. It has something called the System-in-Package that integrates a lot of the chips, so it makes the board layout really simple. So this is just a four-layer circuit board, and it's available in Eagle and also
14:02
in KiCad. And if you have some experience, like if you go over to the hardware hacking area, you can learn to do surface mount assembly, and with a little bit of experience, you could order the board, order the parts, and build your own. Or as Kumar did, he wanted to make a logic analyzer board, so he took the design
14:22
of the Pocket Beagle and he added on the features he needed, like the inputs for the probes, and he also added in gigabit networking. So this is kind of cool to see people take the design of the Pocket Beagle and then modify it for their project, for their use case. And then here's an example of the logo. So the latest board we had was the
14:42
BeagleBone AI, so we registered that back in the summer. So it's U.S. because it was registered in the U.S. as country code, and then it's 169, so it's just like a sequential number. So it's easy for people to identify if they go to the GitHub, okay, it's open source hardware certified, and it links off to the page on the database with
15:03
information about it. So I wanted to mention Alimex, we're here in Europe, and you know Bulgaria is one of the best open hardware companies, in my opinion, and they have a line of open source hardware Linux computers called the oLinux, we know. And the person behind
15:23
Alimex Svetin has a great blog post about open source hardware and why it matters to them. So a few years ago, they wanted to create a 64-bit ARM board that was completely open source and designed in KiCad, which is a free
15:40
software, open source, circuit design software. And Svetin gave a nice talk at FOSDEM a few years ago about the process of them switching from their proprietary CAD software over to KiCad and designing this open source hardware board. And then if you've not heard of KiCad before, or KiCad, doesn't really matter what
16:02
you say, some people say KiCad, some people say KiCad. But it's open source software for designing circuit boards. It's cross platform, it runs on Macs, Windows, and Linux. And one of the cool things about it now is there's developers at CERN that are working on it, and the project leader Wayne is now working on
16:20
it full-time as his job. So it's cool to see a lot of the developers now being able to do it as their day job. So it's kind of getting critical mass in that way. And if you want to try it out, I recommend if you search on YouTube for getting to Blinky, it's a nice tutorial that teaches you how to go through and make a little board that blinks and LED. So Alimex took that board that they
16:46
designed in KiCad, the old Linux we know, A64, and they wanted to make a laptop with it. So that's called the Terrace one. And the design files are on GitHub for it. So the idea there is to make a modular laptop
17:01
that people can put different boards in and things like that. Another interesting open hardware project was the chip, which you might have heard of. It was built as a $9 computer. They had a really successful Kickstarter back in 2015. Unfortunately, the company went out of business in 2018, three years later. But the cool thing
17:23
about it was it was all open source hardware, the schematics, the PCB, the bill of materials. And if you see here, there's this really cool thing called the pocket chip, which was this nice handheld little Linux computer. It was really cool. But the company went out of business, which was unfortunate. But this one person,
17:41
Christopher, he goes by Grogaard. He designed his own board that plugs into the pocket chip. And if you click on the link in the slides, you can see Doom running on it, which is like always the demo that you show with a Linux system. Then he went and designed this other board, which was pretty cool. So this fits into a popular form factor
18:01
for microcontroller boards called the Adafruit Fowler form factor. And this is a full Linux system. And you can, it's fully open source. And there is a crowdfunding campaign for it that happened earlier this year. So one of the things I also want to talk about, especially here at Congress, is the
18:23
idea of open source and FPGAs. And then I'll tell you about how that plays into Linux. So one of the really cool things that's happened over the last couple years, and some of the people here at Congress have been a part of that, like Clifford Wolf and David Shaw, and other people have built free
18:43
software tools that allows you to not have to use the proprietary tools from the FPGA vendors. Kind of wrote an overview of this and recent issue of HackSpace Magazine. You can download the PDF for free if you want to check that out. And one of the talks at
19:01
Congress a few years ago was from Clifford Wolf. So this kind of all started off with this one FPGA called the Ice 40. And he wrote kind of over time wrote different pieces of software that you need to be able to take your design and put it on to an FPGA. So that was for a part called the Ice 40. So that was Project
19:21
IceStorm. And then a few years later David Shaw primarily helped develop open source software that let you put it onto a more capable part called the ECP5. And then most recently there's Project X-Ray and another project called SymbolFlow that's been
19:40
working on bringing open source tools to higher end FPGAs. These Xilinx Series 7 FPGAs that are going to add a lot more capabilities. So why is this important for Linux? Well if we have an FPGA that's capable enough we can put a soft core in there and then we can potentially run Linux on that soft core.
20:03
So Greg is here at Congress and he designed this really cool board. This also in the Adafruit form factor called the Orange Crab. And actually yesterday he got Linux to run on it which was really fun. So this is a open source hardware board. You can download the designs of the board and it's using a soft core in a FPGA to
20:22
run Linux. One of the other boards came out of a hackerspace in Croatia. Radiona that's also using the ECP5 FPGA and that's capable of running Linux as well. And they're doing about to do a crowdfunding campaign now so you can check that out on Crowdsupply. And
20:43
then David Shaw was one of the open source developers. He created this ultimate board called the Trellis board which I think would be probably pretty attractive for running Linux. I think it has like a gigabyte of DDR memory so it's a pretty substantial system for running Linux. And it's open source. You can download the plans and build it. And
21:04
then recently back in November there was the Hackaday Super Conference and everyone at the conference got this badge which was kind of like this Game Boy form factor. But it has the ECP5 FPGA that allows us to have a soft core on there and run Linux. So
21:21
kind of some different options of open hardware boards that are using soft cores in FPGAs to run Linux. And then one of the people over in the open FPGA assembly here at Congress. It's a pretty cool picture. So I was talking about like a soft core. Well what does that look like when it's in FPGA? So this is kind of a cool picture of what it looks like when all those different
21:41
gates are laid out inside the FPGA to have a Linux capable processor core. So one of the ways that we do this is so we talk about a soft core. Well how do you make that? And one of the important pieces of software that all these boards I was just showing you use is a project called LiteX. So
22:01
this is a pretty interesting way of creating a system on chip inside the FPGA and actually uses a Python based language called MyGen. And if you're interested in it I would recommend checking out this blog post from Bunny where he talks about the advantages of it. And it gives you
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things like it gives you like a eRAM controller, ethernet controller, PCI controller, SATA controller. So you can take those pieces of IP and put them together for what you need for your project. And then in terms of the soft core we can one of the things that LiteX gives you is the ability to
22:40
run a RISC-V soft core. So that project's called LiteX on Linux or Linux on LiteX. And that's what the orange crab is using in the Hackaday badge and those other projects, the radio and a board. That's how it's running. There's a couple of projects that are doing similar things as well but the Linux on LiteX is one
23:01
of the ones that a lot of people are using. And a screenshot of what it looks like when it boots up. So I was already kind of talking about RISC-V a bit and if you're not familiar with it you probably heard of like x86 Intel x86 or ARM. That's an instruction set. It's the instructions
23:22
that the processor executes. So you write code, it gets compiled into instructions that run on the processor. So RISC-V is an instruction set that came out of the University of California Berkeley and it's a free and open source instruction set. So anyone can take this instruction set and implement it in a chip, like in a
23:41
FPGA or actually make an actual silicon chip. So one of the examples of this is there's a university in Columbia and they decided to make their own microcontroller based on RISC-V called the OpenV. So this was really cool. It was a fully open source chip. The design of the whole chip is open
24:01
source and it can run the RISC-V instruction set. However it's not quite good enough to or it's not capable enough to run Linux unfortunately. It's more meant for microcontroller applications. Another organization is called LowRisk and they were kind of founded with the idea of being able to create a RISC-V based system on
24:22
chip that could do something like be a basic smartphone. So they're still working on that but I'm pretty excited to see what will happen in the future there. One of the people that started LowRisk is Alex Bradbury and he gave an interesting talk a few months ago about the future of operating systems on RISC-V. So I recommend checking that
24:42
out if you're interested in like the ecosystem of the tool chains involved and things like that. So similar to Oshawa there is a organization for chip design called Fosse which is the free open source silicon foundation and they do a great job of pulling together all these different projects into events.
25:00
They have one called OrConf which happens every year here in Europe. They also have a conference now in the US called LatchUp. That's going to be coming up in April at MIT. They also host a website called LibreCores. So people are designing this open source chip designs or IP blocks for things
25:21
like Ethernet or memory controllers and they created LibreCores as a site that you can share those and so if I'm going to build an open source chip I can go on there and find different blocks or functionality I need. There was also an event earlier this year called the week of open source hardware. So this is all hosted by
25:42
Fosse. They have all the talks online from these conferences if you want to check them out. So one of the companies that was founded by some of the people that created the RISC-V instruction set is called Sci-V and they've actually produced a few commercial chips. One of which is this microcontroller here and one of
26:02
the co-founders and CTOs has an interesting talk about the RISC-V ecosystem and so like companies like Western Digital have decided to switch all the cores in their drives over to RISC-V and NVIDIA has decided to take all the little microcontrollers in their GPUs and turn those over to
26:20
RISC-V as well. This is a microcontroller board based on that Sci-V microcontroller which is quite interesting but unfortunately we can't run Linux on it. So one of the surprises last year at Fosdem was Palmer from Sci-V debuted this board
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called the Hi-V Unleashed. So this is a multi-core 64-bit board that can run Linux. It runs it really well. The one downside to this is it's meant to be an evaluation board so it's quite expensive. It's $1,000 so and they're not going to ever make it in volume so a little disappointing. But the
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other option there, so there's these high-end boards like this one. It's kind of expensive because it's made in low volume. There's also some cheap microcontrollers. One is called from Kendrite, the K210. It is basically a microcontroller with a lot of memory
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and there is possibility to run Linux on it. So at Linux Plumbers this year one of the people from Western Digital gave a talk about running Linux on this kind of essentially a microcontroller. You can check out that link there. There's a talk about it and there's slides from the conference there. Also in the Linux
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kernel they started adding support to be able to run Linux on these RISC-V essentially microcontrollers. It's not great but it's kind of like we kind of have to work with what we have right now. If you're interested more in more about how like Linux runs on
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RISC-V then you can check out this talk from Hot Chips a few months ago and it goes into like how the Linux kernel works on RISC-V. And the other cool thing is both Debian and Fedora have initial distributions now for RISC-V and if you don't have
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hardware like that unleash board you can still try this out on your computer using an emulator called QEMU. So one of the things that's exciting is like two weeks ago at the RISC-V summit in California NXP announced that
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there's going to be a chip early next year that's going to be a Linux capable SOC. So this is quite exciting this could allow us to make like a board that wouldn't be too expensive and be pretty high performance. So one of the things I want to hopefully maybe be a part of or encourage people to do
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is make a board that's less than a one route is we use FPGAs, another route is maybe when this chip comes out that'd be a possibility and then could we do it by the next CCC? I don't know. If you're interested in this get in touch I would like to try and get
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a community effort going around this idea of making a RISC-V board that can run Linux. So I don't know if we have any time left but happy to take questions. Thanks Ro, yeah we actually do
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have some time left actually about 10 minutes so if you do have questions pile up at the microphones that you see here and we start with a question from the internet. Sure take your time
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just start talking into the microphone. Yeah why is the the microphone of the signal angel not working? All right we just start with a question from microphone number two then while the signal angel is working out his microphone. There you go. Is this working?
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Yes. Move close to the microphone though. It is on, it is on. All right thank you very much, thank you very much for the talk. I've been having a lot of fun using your pocket beagle in combination with the Bella system actually been able to get it on stage
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on the Royal Albert Hall earlier this year and one of the things I really enthused about in that project is that using the Xenomai real-time operating system it really seems to super be a bridge between like the low latency performance of a microprocessor
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and the octopus connect to everything and low entry to development of Linux world. Have you seen more of these examples using Xenomai or other things? Yeah so just to get people that aren't familiar with the terms a little bit of background, Xenomai is essentially
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this co-kernel that runs alongside Linux and allows you to do like real-time tasks like in this case audio like low latency audio for instruments or other things like doing motor control. The Linux kernel developers have been doing a lot of work of getting the Linux kernel to run
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great with real-time tasks but depends on what your deadlines are so for things like building instruments those are pretty latency sensitive and Xenomai is a run route of doing that so if you're interested in another project it's called machine kit it's an open source CNC controller they similarly have deadlines like having to
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read a motor encoder or send out pulses to a stepper motor so you know I think it really, so with real-time things is what you're talking about it really depends on what your deadlines are like so in the case of Bella they're still using Xenomai because they need to be they need a certain minimum latency that that they can
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still only achieve with that but I will say with the Linux kernel there's been a lot of work that's been going on and the Linux kernel is much better than it used to be a terms of handling real-time tasks okay and if you're interested in Bella I think there's someone from the team here in the room so really yeah you can yeah the person identifies
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themselves here all right thanks for the question thanks for the answer let's have another try with the internet is using open source software for board design required or enforced to get the open hardware certification yeah that's a really good question which I probably didn't clarify enough so according to the
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open source hardware definition that we have from Oshawa you can use whatever software you want one of the reasons is for for certain types of things especially like mechanical design proprietary software is still the norm this also the case with circuit design key cabs only really gotten like really good and stable probably in the
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last five years so kind of as a matter of practicality ten years ago like most people were still using proprietary software to design mechanical designs and software designs ideally I think you know if the idea is you want to enable collaboration using free software using open-source software would enable as many people as possible to be able to contribute to
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your project but it is not according to our definition that we have hosted on Oshawa it's not a requirement so I say best practice use free software but it's not required thanks microphone number one please how far is the performance for everyday computing on risk five like can I run my everyday programming
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toolchain on a risk five processor you could run it the one downside to the soft cores on these FPGAs so like the ECP5 which I mentioned it's only running at maybe 50 megahertz 100 megahertz one of the reasons I brought up symbol
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flow and in project x-ray is that's gonna enable us to use open-source tools on these higher-end Xilinx FPGAs which will unlock greater performance still with soft cores it's it's gonna be if you're looking to be competitive with like ARM and Intel it's not going to be there but one of the cool things that to think about is an FPGA so you have a lot of flexibility like in
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terms of the peripherals you can do you know so kind of getting creative in terms of well maybe the clock speeds not really fast but it's an FPGA so you could add hardware accelerators to do things that you might otherwise be burning cycles on a processor to do but that's also I'm hoping people will
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start making chips I'm excited about that NXP announcement because yeah like we need silicon to have like the performance that we're used to on like ARM and Intel thanks we have yet another question from the internet do you think it's feasible to create a package manager for open hardware like PIP or
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NPM that is a good question and I think one of the things that I would say like open open hardware is almost kind of like 20 years behind open store software and I think one of the reasons is a lot of the tools that people use for designing hardware it's difficult to collaborate on designs you know a lot of these CAD programs like
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it's not the same as like source code like you know I store all my hardware designs on github but if I look at like the diffs and get like you know they're not very meaningful so I think one of the issues we have is is for people to collaborate on hardware like we need better tools that allowed us to track changes and do pull requests and
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merges in a more meaningful way so I'm sure everyone here that's used CAD tools and tried to work with people it's it can be it can be difficult so I think that's an area that can be improved in terms of like hosting things you know I just talked to someone today that talked about the open source hardware observatory
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where they were trying to like collect lots of different projects so I think we can definitely have like websites that like show what projects are out there but in terms of like being able to like collaborate on things like Libre cores check out Libre cores they're trying to do that as well for processor design being able to go on there and like grab ethernet controller or a memory controller in a way actually a chip
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designs almost better because if you look at the hardware design languages it's more like source code but yeah CAD is difficult to collaborate on still I think already microphone number one please during your presentation you mentioned that there are several great
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projects trying to develop software for FPGA for commercial FPGA devices I was wondering if you are aware of any project trying to develop open source FPGA architecture something similar to RISC-V instruction set but for FPGA world right so um yeah the other thing here is so we're talking about open source tools for getting things
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onto FPGAs but there's also the idea of like the open source chip design so don't personally I've not heard of any like projects where they're trying to do like an open source FPGA but I think if you if you have time stop by the open FPGA assembly and also over in the in the hardware hacking area
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Tim and Tim Ansell and Zabs are over there and they they know a lot about things that are happening there as well but I think it would be cool and Bunny's talk here at Congress on the first day was about the idea of like using FPGAs because they're more easier to inspect and if we can make
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like an open source FPGA chip I think that'd be even better another question from the internet please what about performance per watt I'm sorry what about performance per watt with uh RISC-V or FPGAs or both I think both um yeah um
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probably FPGAs are not great with that because um you know as as compared to an ASIC or a silicon design they're not as power efficient um RISC-V I don't know I've not seen a whole lot of numbers around that um you know I think it's still kind of early days when it comes to RISC-V also like a lot of it's still soft cores and FPGAs which are not going to be as great in terms of
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power but um there is a project out of uh ETH Zurich the the university uh called PULP P-U-L-P and it stands for um parallel ultra low power uh so that's a family of RISC-V cores so check out uh PULP um from ETH Zurich I think they're trying to do low power things
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good question though microphone number one thanks for the great talk so as you mentioned there's a lot of NDAing and copywriting going on in the hardware world um so one of the uh slides you showed showed the RISC-V core within with an Xe4 interface next to it
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so my question is do we have all the components the peripheral components to make a full processor on open source or is there still gaps in there I think there's still a lot of work to be done there and that's something that um Lidex is is trying to do like to to pull together these um different IP blocks that you need to build a system on chip
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um same thing with Libre cores um but if you take a look at Sci-5 like um not everything so the core is open source but in order to tape out a chip that had a certain functionality like not all of the IP on there is open source so I think that's something that hopefully in the future um as as more people start doing open source IP for chip design we can
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hopefully have all the different blocks that we need um to make a chip um like one of the things Sci-5 is missing on their chips is USB um you know traditionally people like will get like uh USB controller from uh mentor or synopsis or something like that so having good uh you know verified proven IP for these common peripherals is
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important um so yeah it might be an open core but then it might have proprietary blocks around it so there's a lot of room there for improvement I think and with that we're wrapping up thank you very much for all of your interesting questions also thank you very much for all the angels working here thank you very much to all the people from Meselitesich, the audioV people who worked
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and of course the biggest thank you again to Drew thank you very much for the awesome talk another big warm round of applause please thank you