[wsfii-discuss] Looking for contacts ...

Fri May 22 16:40:51 UTC 2009

Hi Ben,

here are some more details about the open chip issue:

In brief we ( OHI aka Open Hardware Initiative aka http://open-hw.org ) are evaluating possibilities to not just get into the design and manufacturing of open embedded devices (like router boards), but also to try to design chips with open sourced patterns.

With what we have experienced so far, it is relatively easy to find open source minded people with enough skills to design boards based on exsisting chips (e.g. openmoko, openpandora). But with the knowledge we have gained so far, we can clearily see the need for open source chip designs, too, as otherwise they will to a certain extent stay black boxes - not just towards the open source software community. And this always means certain factitious limitations in the possibilities of their usage, of course.

Also, as we have found out, with money given by the world bank over the past years there have chip facturies been  build arround the globe (e.g. in Zansebar), which would have the potential capacities to build chips, but sometimes are not running any production at all ...

As me and my combatants strongly believe in the economic and socio-economic power of open standards, we are willing to gather experts to design a chip for wireless radio data transmission. The reason for picking out this field is that we know that the frequency regualtions are changing arround the globe. 

As we can tell from the great success of 802.11 in bridging the digital devide, the ablity to make use of this white spectrum for future communication platforms is a seeking effort to take. There are already interesting approaches like the GNU public radio, but until today there are not the radio chips we would need for building such devices. This is where we are heading ...

I you were willing to join our group I would be more than happy. We are currently just in a presetup phase, were we want to evaluate if we can gather a group of experts with the right mindset and skills. Phase 2 would be getting deeper into the discussion about feasibility.

Would you want to join?

Juergen