Making open source hardware design a reality

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • awesome-opensource-hardware

    List of awesome open source hardware tools, generators, and reusable designs

  • opentitan

    OpenTitan: Open source silicon root of trust

  • Whilst open source hardware work goes back a fair way, I feel we're really at a turning point where it can become a serious force within the hardware world (think late 80s/early 90s in software terms, Linux and GCC emerging and beginning to find their feet). There's lots of interesting developments in tooling plus significant open hardware projects on-going.

    I shall take the opportunity to plug OpenTitan: https://github.com/lowRISC/opentitan

    It's an open source root of trust being developed collaboratively by multiple companies such as lowRISC (who I work for), Google, Western Digital and Seagate amongst others. We've been rather quiet on the PR front but there's a lot of engineering work happening and other exciting things we can't yet make public.

    Whilst there's some things we have to keep closed (generally relating to ASIC design kits and things like Flash and memory IP) the vast majority of the RTL, documentation and software is open. Plus we're doing development in the open, the public repo is our live development repo. We're not developing it in private then just opening the end product.

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  • skywater-pdk

    Open source process design kit for usage with SkyWater Technology Foundry's 130nm node.

  • Taping out an actual chip inevitably involves IP that's not yours, e.g. the standard cell library and other 'physical' IP like memories and flash. You cannot open source that as it is not yours and in general the owners of it won't want to open source it either (though there are exceptions e.g. the Skywater 130nm PDK https://github.com/google/skywater-pdk).

    In OpenTitan we've built all the 'logical' IP ourselves from the ground up. This is the Verilog RTL you can see in our repository but you need the 'physical' IP to make a real chip. We haven't built any physical IP so we need to get it from the traditional industry sources which means traditional industry licensing (i.e. very much not open).

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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