Part of The definitive guide to open source hardware projects in 2009
Processors – You can actually make and fabricate your own chips, I have met anyone who does this but there are a couple huge projects that openly share CPUs and on-chip interconnections. Living room chip fabs are a few years away (well, Jeri has one) but here’s a glimpse.
Opencores
OpenCores is a foundation that attempts to form a community of designers to support open-source cores (logic designs) for CPUs, peripherals and other devices. OpenCores maintains an open-source on-chip interconnection bus specification called Wishbone. ORSoC has designed a development kit for the OpenRISC processor. This kit enables easy access to the OpenRISC platform and gives the designer a fast start.
Price: Various
Visit the project page
OpenSPARC
OpenSPARC is an open source hardware project started in December 2005. The initial contribution to the project was Sun Microsystems’ Register transfer level (RTL) Verilog code for a full 64-bit, 32-thread microprocessor, the UltraSPARC T1 processor.
Price: Various
Visit the project page
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