|
Message
From: Bill Cox<bill@v...>
Date: Wed Jan 28 21:13:38 CET 2004
Subject: [oc] Potentially awesome open-source idea
Stuart Brorson wrote:>My reaction to the SoC builder this is: It sounds very interesting!
>But it's also a big project. How will people be motivated to work on
>it, besides doing it for fun? That is, how will it make money for the
>software engineers working on the project, or the companies who employ
>them? What's the business model? This is important, because without
>the prospect of money, progress on such a large project will be
>slooooooow.
>
There are a couple possible ways to make money here.
First, here's mine. I own a lot of ViASIC stock. ViASIC will do much
better if people can be productive using our one-mask structured ASIC
fabric. We specialize in producing structured ASICs with very low NRE,
but that's only useful if the design cost to produce an ASIC is also low
(and I'm not a fan of sending all our jobs to India). OpenCores already
helps in this area a lot, which is why I'm a fan. Taking it further by
reducing the required design effort will also be good for ViASIC.
Here's a possible motivation for a smart ASIC designer that would like
to go into business for himself. These customizable cores may require a
ton of work. For example, let's think about the 8-bit microcontroller
market. An expert in this field will be able to configure our scripts
and web interface to customize a microcontroller using a wishbone bus
and several cores available on OpenCores. More importantly, he can
provide support to users, emulators, links to compilers and debuggers,
etc. In effect, the ASIC designer could set-up shop as a virtual chip
company. People would go to his web site, configure their
microcontroller, download an FPGA emulation bitstream, pay a few
thousand dollars to the ASIC guy, and send a chip order to someone like
ViASIC or one of our partners (again, more motivation for me). A few
weeks later, a UPS truck drops off a few thousand parts to the customer.
The market for these "virtaul chip" companies (as I call them) could be
huge. The major missing peices are 1) advanced cheap silicon in low
volume, and 2) easy configuration/selection of cores. OpenCores seems
like a natural place to work on the second problem. I'm personally
working hard on the first problem, and I'm going to nail it if I can get
the resources to do it.
Bill
|
 |
Browse
