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OPENCORES: Mission The need Today, deep submicron (DSM) designs include many millions of gates in a single application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). The number of gates continues to grow, with the result that design times get longer and longer. This can result in excessive time- to-market and excessive cost. The technical solution to the problem is core re-use. This speeds up the design by enabling engineers to cooperate. Currently, cores available for integration are proprietary and must be purchased from established vendors, often at very high prices. These costs can be burdensome, especially for small design teams with limited funding. Proprietary cores are hard to integrate due to the multiplicity of incompatible design and test tools. Usually, proprietary cores lack adequate documentation, and the purchasor does not have access to the source, which makes the task of integration much more difficult, perhaps prohibitively so. Project objective Our main objective is to design and publish core designs under a license for hardware modelled on the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) for software. We are committed to the ideal of freely available, freely usable and re-usable open source hardware. Subsidiary objectives We have set the following objectives as the means of reaching our main objective: Develop standards for open source cores and platforms Create tools and methods for development of open source cores and platforms Develop open source cores and platforms Provide documentation for these cores and platforms These tools and methods should allow large, widespread, even international, teams to develop hardware in an open way. Expected benefits Open source hardware is the solution to most of the problems associated with proprietary cores. It has the following benefits. Each core will have a larger user base, which will ensure better support, better documentation and better implementation examples to work from. The source is available, so any developer can find out what he or she needs to know about the core. There is no charge for using the core. Eventually, as cores and standards for them are developed, cores will become more standards-compliant than proprietary cores. Challenges How can the reliability of open source cores be guaranteed? What precise licensing methods should be used? History OpenCores community and web portal have been founded by Damjan Lampret in October 1999. During 8 years while Damjan Lampret has maintained the web portal, OpenCores became extremely well known in the hi-tech industry. In 2006 over 5000 different companies have downloaded IP from OpenCores. On average 80,000 engineers and others have visited OpenCores web site each month and generated 7.5 million web hits and 2.8 million page views monthly. It is estimated that more than a million engineers have downloaded IP from OpenCores in the first eight years of OpenCores existence. Damjan Lampret has also created one of the most successful OpenCores projects – the OpenRISC. The OpenRISC 32-bit embedded processor core and its GNU toolchain have been downloaded more than a million times between October 1999 and October 2007. Today the OpenRISC processor is being used in variety of products. Further references For further reference visit these web sites: Free Software Foundation and the GNU project Open Source initiative Please send you comments and opinions to oc-team@o...