[wsfii-discuss] Looking for contacts ...

Mon May 11 17:36:56 UTC 2009

Hi Ben,

> Could you respond with more detail?  That is, do you mean ASIC design,
> firmware development for SoC products, or even microprogramming?  A
> variety of open systems exist for the latter two.
> 
> Furthermore, are there specific architectures that you look at, i.e.
> from TI, Freescale, Atmel, Microchip?

I am trying to gather a list of people who are needed and willing to develop a SoC. Unfortunatelly I guess it needs  all the skills you mentioned above. ;-) I recently want to evaluate whether there are people out there in the world who have the skills AND the willingness to work on a project to develop open sourced chips at all. 

Together with others I have cofounded the OpenHardware Initiative a while ago. Over time I see a growing number of open hardware designs of all kinds out there today and I can clearly tell that ASICs have already been a great step forward in opening up certain designs and realizing certain projects. But the more I dig into the topic, the more I understand that we will need at least some types of truely OpenSourced Chips in the end. 

I do of course have a clear picture of how complicated and ressource consuming this will become. And I know that it takes this and that which might partly or fully be almost impossible to get or realize. But before I throw in the towel I would like to at least discuss some of my ideas with people who might potentially be interested in this approach and have some kind of expertise to help. 

Therefore I am seriously wondering if there are specialists out there, who might be willing to join into a project of developing a completely OpenSourced SoC. And I think that besides individuals, a coalition between several up-front people at various universities arround the globe could be of great help, too.

Are you either one of them? Do you know anyone?

Thx,

Juergen