Some people argue that hardware is so expensive to manufacture and modify that it prevents hobbyists from contributing, and thus stifles the development of an open source hardware community.

This isn’t entirely true. In fact, the huge popularity of community-developed microcontroller platforms (Arduino and its huge collection of add-on modules being the most famous examples) tends to show the opposite. Other examples include the USRP software-defined radio platform, Texas Instrument’s Beagleboard single board computer, or the Openmoko mobile phone (though the latter has enjoyed limited success).

But while those projects feature open and public hardware specifications, ”traditional” schematics, printed circuit boards and mechanical designs, the whole semiconductor design and manufacturing process remains a poorly covered area. There are a few pioneers like GRLIB (LEON3), OpenSPARC and OpenRISC. But all suffer from excessive complexity, slowness and large hardware resource usage – if not outright poor or unfinished design. These factors make them difficult to access and stifle their wide adoption, with a need for oversized FPGAs, modern semiconductor processes and advanced logic synthesis tools – all being very expensive.

The Milkymist project thus develops a high performance system-on-chip (SoC) design with the economy of resources and of complexity in mind. It is targetted at the demanding application of real time video effect rendering for embedded systems, and wants to prove that open hardware logic designs can compete in terms of performance.

The Milkymist SoC is based on Lattice’s Mico32 CPU core, and features a host of custom-developed peripherals, like a DDR SDRAM controller, various I/O interfaces and graphics acceleration.

But Milkymist’s founder, Sébastien Bourdeauducq, said that they are not stopping there. They are developing a complete open hardware product out of this system-on-chip, which includes software, schematics, PCB, and enclosure. The end product will be an “interactive VJ station”, a device meant to be used during concerts and artistic events to generate real time video effects and make them interactive thanks to the many built-in interfaces (MIDI, DMX, video input, Ethernet, OSC, USB, GPIO).

To foster development on this open hardware platform, Free Electronic Lab (formerly known as Fedora Electronic Lab) and Milkymist are collaborating to provide the smoothest and easiest to setup programming environment as possible.

At this time, the full system-on-chip design is complete (the current focus is on improving its documentation and fixing any bug that can be found) and the second batch of PCBs (hopefully based on the final design) is on its way to the fab. If everything goes well, some development kits will be available for sale at the end of December.

For more information, visit www.milkymist.org.

The aim is to eliminate duplication of work for application developers by providing a range of libraries and development tools which have already been ported to the cross-compiler environment. This means that developers will not need to recompile the application stack themselves, but can concentrate just on the changes needed to their own application.

Though this feature will interest a wide range of software developers, I believe EDA vendors will also be very interested. I will demonstrate a quick example of how to use these Windows cross-compilers.

In this demo, I will use gerbv, a gerber viewer and the example “Temperature Collector” developed by Levente Kovacs.

To install gerbv on fedora,

# yum install gerbv

The above screenshot shows gerbv compiled under a normal Linux “configure && make”. Now we will compile the same gerbv for Windows.

1. Download the sources of gerbv.

2. Setup your Fedora 11 Linux

# yum install mingw32-gcc mingw32-gtk2 mingw32-crossreport mingw32-nsiswrapper wine

3. Configure Wine.

4. Extract gerbv sources.

5. Compilation of gerbv for Windows
$ cd gerbv-2.2.0
$ mingw32-configure
$ mingw32-make

The final Windows executable file of gerbv will be stored in src/.libs/ as gerbv.exe together with its DLL file, libgerbv-1.dll.

6. Launch gerbv.exe under wine

$ wine src/.libs/gerbv.exe

7. Test gerbv.exe under windows.

Under windows, extra DLLs are required and these can be downloaded from The GTK+ Project or simply from here.

The gerber files used in this example, my compiled gerbv.exe and libgerbv-1.dll can be downloaded from here.

mingw32-nsiswrapper can later be used for building automated Windows installers for distribution.

I hope this short crash course will help you. For any additional details, please join the Fedora Mingw mailing list or IRC: #fedora-mingw on FreeNode.

References:

• Fedora IRC Classroom – Using the Windows cross-compiler with Richard Jones
• Windows cross compiler Feature wiki page

The development cycle Fedora Electronic Lab 12 has started. One key feature for the next Fedora 12 release will be improving “collaborative hardware development experience” on Fedora. As a test-case scenario, let’s imagine 4 persons (from 4 different continents) have encountered each other using a particular social networking medium and want to engage into the development of a FPGA project.

While Fedora Electronic Lab already includes the respective simulators for digital design (VHDL/Verilog), waveforms viewers, schematic editors, PCB layout editor and Fedora’s different webserver and security solutions, these 4 persons (test-case scenario) should not have any issue with the latest Fedora 11 release.

For Fedora 12, we want to ensure that these persons have adequate tools to set up a webserver dedicated for hardware design and help them improve their sign-off and code review methodologies. Hardware code review for small inexperienced companies is often misguided and ends up wasting work hours in unnecessary meetings. Designers often have mixed feelings about code reviews. Sometimes when the code review is outsourced to a third party, source codes are sent in the form of tarballs and tracked as tarballs instead of files, which this is no means an efficient way.

We are currently including an efficient and reliable code review solution into the Fedora collection. This free and opensource solution will also help create links and seamless references between bugs, tasks, changesets and files. Project coordinators will have a more realistic the overview of the on-going project and track the progress very easy with respect to different milestones and deadlines.

Coupled with Fedora’s commitment in Virtualization and SELinux, hardware designers will benefit with a free and robust platform which can easily be deployed.

Some of you may know me from my work behind Fedora Electronic Lab. For about three years now, we are proposing an opensource ASIC design and simulation platform, which is fairly well accepted by many universities around the world. We are working closely with many upstream projects such as gEDA, veripool, open circuit design, … in order to ensure interoperability between our solutions.

At the same time, Fedora developers are introducing Windows cross-compilers for the next version. Thereby, EDA vendors can also use Fedora or entreprise-class distribution such as RHEL or CentOS as a development ground for their products.

Later, I will introduce other features such as virtualisation, mass deployment, various design handoff checking facilities, … etc each accompanying with at least an example. Many designers and CAD engineers are already using opensource tools such as Vi, Emacs, svn, … I am looking forward to read your comments on my next posts.