As someone pretty integrated with open source hardware, this initiative weirds me out.
There's a growing community around open source silicon, whether that means ASICs with Openlane & the Skywater PDK or FPGAs with Symbiflow or more general cores with the FOSSi Foundation. But as far as I can tell, none of the folks on the board of OSFPGA are affiliated with any of that work with the exception of Brian Faith from QuickLogic (which uses Symbiflow as their first-party toolchain IIRC). Co-Chairman Naveed Sherwani lead SiFive for a while and started a bunch of companies/organizations with "Open" in the name (like OpenFive), but none of these are "open" in any open-source sense as far as I can tell.
Further, membership is expensive and representation on the "board" is determined by the amount of capital you have which feels antithetical to building an inclusive community where passionate individuals can contribute (and indeed, much of the OSS in this space is driven by insanely productive individuals like Claire Wolf & whitequark).
Finally, quoting from the press release:
> The Open Source FPGA Foundation offers a set of free and open source tools
But the github is empty except for a singular project that just links to work done before the formation of this entity?
So constructive feedback, if you're involved with this initiative, please reach out to one of the many communities that already exist:
Still early days, but I disagree with some of your assertions. Seems to be a bit of an echo chamber in osh these days...
The effort was not created in vacuum.
-The skywater effort sits on top of darpa's openroad (I am currently on the board and so is serge)
-Prof Gaillardon and Xifan created the "openfpga" open source generator and taped out a skywater and 12nm (see woset best paper) [edit: and they are the founders of osfpga]
-Vaughn Betz created VTR which symbiflow is based on.[edit: and he is on the board]
-Yosys/Claire has done amazing work but it was possble thanks to Alan Mishchenko's ABC. De Michelli and Gaillardon have similar package to ABC that is definitely worth a look.
-The fees seem to be in line with other organizations, chips alliance, riscv foundation, etc.
I'm familiar with the OpenFPGA stuff but hadn't connected it to the folks listed -- consider this an ask to have bios on the site as I evidently picked the wrong people to google. It's great to know there's more than meets the eye here beyond a vague press release I can't make heads or tails of.
Looking at other hardware-related foundations (like the RISC-V foundation) there are explicit callouts for "individuals not representing a legal entity," which is where someone like myself would fit, but the bucketing on OSFPGA makes it seem like people in this group who are not students (for example, me, not that I'm particularly special) don't have a place here. (As an aside, I dislike how many orgs collapse members and sponsors into one thing, but that's neither here nor there).
Finally, I didn't mean to imply that the work I mentioned came whole cloth from the respective author's heads. Sorry if what I wrote conveyed that.
I do feel Intel if anybody could of pushed FPGA's into consumer space. Heck even if they added a basic small affair onto their chips as standard it would open up software and standards. See you need to software as much as the hardware to drive standards that get adopted as a standard that is not adopted is a swing thru the middle of the tree called a swing.
I hope this pans out well. After all, imagine if your OS could do a few custom instructions in a FPGA as an OS accelerator, offload some of the routines not already enshrined into a dedicated instruction.
I would also add, there is one avenue that may see this pan well, if you can do crytomining upon them - that would certainly be a blessing for all as would get them into mass production, shift the crypto's away from GPU's and much good would come from it. That's the optimistic hope how we will get some FPGA's into the standard CPU/SOC offerings in much the same way the FPU was a separate chip at one stage in CPU life.
About 2 decades ago, the micro-controller world was extremely closed. If you needed an IDE, compiler or debug tool there was no choice besides ugly proprietary options. Then arduino happened.
Boards that support Symbiflow are the arduinos of FPGA.
There is a major difference in that Symbiflow doesn't necessarily have the support from the hardware vendors, and the FPGA hardware designs are still closed. At least for Xilinx. What would really help is an open FPGA that can compete with midsize FPGAs such as Xilinx 7-series.
next startup: hosted design entry and CI/CD for FPGA... Every time Vivado taskbars go back and forth forever I start writing a Javascript clone of the block designer and scripts to launch builds on AWS...
I want to break into FPGA development for PCIe devices. The lowest cost PCIe one I could find is a Xilinx Atrix-7 based NiteFury by RHS Research. The product page says it supports Vivado, which I've downloaded to see if it's tooling I can pick up as a beginner. Does this sound like a sane approach to you?
The Artix-7 is an excellent series of devices for learning how to work with PCIe. You're limited to Gen2 speeds, but that's not an issue for developing most applications. One thing to keep in mind is that "Artix 7" is an entire product line of devices, not a single chip -- there's a spread of "amount of logic resources" with prices to match.
Also, the whole Artix 7 line is supported under the free licensing, so you can actually get started and learn a lot even before you have a development board. You should do this! You'll find that you can develop your design and test it in simulation before you ever touch hardware, and this also helps you plan for exactly what hardware you'll need...
Check out non-project mode and tcl based flow. It takes more up front work but once you have it scripted out, you can build from nothing but tcl files and source files. Even with block designs and IP files. All of it is replaceable by human readable tcl files.
There's a growing community around open source silicon, whether that means ASICs with Openlane & the Skywater PDK or FPGAs with Symbiflow or more general cores with the FOSSi Foundation. But as far as I can tell, none of the folks on the board of OSFPGA are affiliated with any of that work with the exception of Brian Faith from QuickLogic (which uses Symbiflow as their first-party toolchain IIRC). Co-Chairman Naveed Sherwani lead SiFive for a while and started a bunch of companies/organizations with "Open" in the name (like OpenFive), but none of these are "open" in any open-source sense as far as I can tell.
Further, membership is expensive and representation on the "board" is determined by the amount of capital you have which feels antithetical to building an inclusive community where passionate individuals can contribute (and indeed, much of the OSS in this space is driven by insanely productive individuals like Claire Wolf & whitequark).
Finally, quoting from the press release:
> The Open Source FPGA Foundation offers a set of free and open source tools
But the github is empty except for a singular project that just links to work done before the formation of this entity?
So constructive feedback, if you're involved with this initiative, please reach out to one of the many communities that already exist:
- The Skywater Slack
- The Symbiflow Slack
- The YosysHQ Slack
- #openfpga & #symbiflow on freenode
- The 1BitSquared Discord