Archive for the 'EDA' Category

Ethical gadgets

Published
by
muks
on December 24, 2007
in EDA
. 0 Comments

Make Magazine has a nice list of items that gadgets should conform to, so that they are user friendly. Most of them are reasonable and should be required. Here are some more that I want:

  1. Gadgets must support open formats, and preferrably not have DRM at all
  2. No frail wires in the open that can snap off
  3. Any chipsets and processors that the gadget uses must at the very least have open and complete documentation
  4. Any firmware / software on a gadget should be free software, along with a HOWTO on how the software can be compiled and replaced by the user
  5. It’s the designer’s job to make sure the gadget cannot be disabled (or `bricked’) by any software updates, and it must always be possible to reload a default image and get the gadget back to its factory state

OpenSPARC

Published
by
muks
on September 9, 2006
in EDA and Linux
. 0 Comments

If the GPL’d source code of the OpenSPARC chip design, Open Boot PROM, hypervisor and other architecture tools wasn’t good enough to make you drool, a company called Simple RISC has made a derived single core design which you can simulate and synthesize using Icarus Verilog and other supporting free software tools on Linux. A great day for freedom!

Simple RISC says in the simulation docs that Icarus Verilog is much slower than other commercial software for simulation. However, there are other free software alternatives like Verilator (which claims that it’s about 100 times faster than Icarus Verilog) that one can try using.

Sun: Not being your apologist, but I know you’ve been getting some bad press in the freedom industry ;) lately. What you have done with OpenSPARC rocks. I hope you think and make a right choice for the proposed open source JDK license.