4 ms·
Not sure I see what the purpose of taping out Leon at 180nm? Is it just to have an open source CPU? Hardware is only useful if it's competitive.
by adapteva 10y ago
Not sure I see what the purpose of taping out Leon at 180nm? Is it just to have an open source CPU? Hardware is only useful if it's competitive.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoThe parent was satisfied with a low-performing chip that was fully open. There's a niche of people that want fully-open, inspectable hardware they control totally. I keep calling out proponents with Leon given they've been able to accomplish that at 350nm w/ visual inspection and 180-130nm affordably at least with OSS HW. Plus, there's quite a few open, cell libraries at 0.13nm. Anyway, you know what I wanted: open-source, 28nm FPGA w/ key I/O already included so I could synthesize my own CPU's and such on it. Verify one design in hardware, worry about the rest in simulation. You never got back to me on that one. Whether it was a good idea to solve most people's open-hardware concerns or what it might cost? (I'll say a Virtex-6 amount of slices or memories with USB 2.0, DDR3, PCI-E, SATA, and 10/100/1000 Ethernet onboard. Should do.)