Open Hardware – SUN opens up UltraSPARC processors

Just recently I played with the open hardware idea when blogging about the $100 laptop. Now, SUN has opened up their UltraSPARC T1 processor design [1,2]. Of course, it is a long way from Verilog to the final chip. But at least for Universities it is an intersting opportunity.

At the Ingenieurschule Biel we used to work with Verilog and VHDL [3] and then implemented alorightms and microprocessor cores etc. in FPGA chips, as it has e.g. been done for the the so called \”Gecko\” project [4]. Verilog and FPGA are quite perfect for rapid prototyping and therefore of interest for research and development industries.

[1] http://news.google.ch/news?q=open+sparc+sun
[2] http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2005-12/sunflash.20051206.4.html
[3] http://www.hta-bi.bfh.ch/E/Laboratories/Microelectronics/courses/vlsi/VLSIsystem.pdf
[4] http://www.microlab.ch/pdf/Papers/soc01.pdf

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