El Correo Libre Issue 28

Published in

LibreCores

5 min readJun 18, 2020

This edition of El Correo Libre will be a bit shorter as our editor, Gareth Halfacree, is on well-deserved holiday. However, there are important announcements that you should be the first to learn about!

This month we are starting our new online event series FOSSi Dial-Up. It will be a monthly event featuring distinctive speakers from the FOSSi Community. In an hour-long session you can learn about impressive projects every month, followed by a Q&A session.

The premiere FOSSi Dial-Up will start with a series of presentations on an outstanding new project. Google and Skywater Technology have launched a collaboration to provide the open source Skywater Process Development Kit (PDK). Such a PDK is the fundamental ingredient for chip design and a free and open source PDK along with standard cells, RAM compilers etc. is one of the few remaining missing links in our community’s ambition to free the last nanometer. The first “season” of FOSSi Dial-Up will therefore be a series of presentations about the open source Skywater PDK and its ecosystem. Please visit our website to learn more and to join the event.

We are also pleased to announce that FOSSi Foundation has taken over stewardship of the Solderpad Hardware License (SHL). Coinciding with this there has been a new version published, SHL v2.1, together with other exciting news. Further details can be found below.

Finally, as has become all too common of late, we announce that our annual ORConf conference will not be proceeding as usual in 2020. To state the obvious: this is for reasons of public health. The entire point of ORConf is to bring the FOSSi Community together in one place for several days of presentations and face-to-face time, and unfortunately it is this type of event which cannot go ahead under the current circumstances. Fear not, we’ll be back with ORConf and all of the FOSSi Foundation’s events in 2021, and we can’t wait to see everybody again next year.

Stefan Wallentowitz
Director at the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation

Have feedback or news for inclusion in a future newsletter? Please send this to ecl@librecores.org. Subscribe to get El Correo Libre direct to your inbox.

This Month in Open Silicon

Plenticore brings plenty of cores

Habitual LUT eliminator Olof Kindgren likely set a new record by putting 5087 RISC-V cores in an FPGA, using his own SERV core which claims to be the world’s smallest RISC-V core. This effort is part of the CoreScore project which aims to provide a benchmark for FPGAs by counting the number of SERV cores they can hold.

More information is available in the GitHub repository.

Solderpad Hardware License v2.1 and Governance

A new version of the Solderpad Hardware License (SHL) — the popular license for free and open source hardware projects — has been released. This incorporates a number of improvements, including the way that definitions are applied and making it clearer how it should be applied as a wraparound of the Apache 2.0 License.

In addition the new version and the previous, SHL v2.0, have both been included in the latest SPDX License List. These developments also coincide with the license moving to stewardship as a project under the FOSSi Foundation, with its website in the process of being refreshed and a governance committee being set up.

For further details, see the official announcement.

World’s first vendor-supported FOSSi FPGA toolchain has arrived

The notoriously closed world of FPGA EDA tools was just shaken to its core when San Jose-based QuickLogic announced the release of a toolchain for its devices which uses only open source tools. This announcement was received warmly by proponents of open source silicon. “This is a milestone I and many others have been waiting for many years. It’s the first FPGA vendor that delivers a FOSSi toolchain for its devices” said FOSSi Foundation director Olof Kindgren. The toolchain was jointly developed by Antmicro in collaboration with QuickLogic and Google

More information is available from the QuickLogic Open Reconfigurable Computing (QORC) website.

A feature-packed package manager update

A new version of FuseSoC, the popular package manager for IP cores, was released to bring new features and fixes to its users. In addition to the FuseSoC 1.11.0 release, its sister project Edalize 0.2.2 was also released this month to bring support for evermore EDA tools.

For further details see the FuseSoC Github repository.

Linux SMP comes to LiteX/VexRiscv on Arty A7

Antmicro recently announced the addition of a scalable multi-core configuration to the VexRiscv CPU, working with the original developer and maintainer, Charles Papon, to implement the necessary changes. This has been showcased, used together with LiteX peripheral IPs, to create an quad-core SMP SoC running Linux.

More information is available in the Antmicro blog post.