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God I hate that term. It's not your secret sauce intellectual property, it's a fucking library. Possibly the biggest reason FPGA/ASIC tech has lagged so hard

God I hate that term. It's not your secret sauce intellectual property, it's a fucking library. Possibly the biggest reason FPGA/ASIC tech has lagged so hard behind CPU/GPGPU in terms of consumer use is because they have managed to use their hardware to completely stifle all open source software (they even go to some lengths to distance themselves from the term "software"). FPGA libraries are almost always encrypted and have to be treated as a true black box when designing. Doing things as mundane as interacting with a PCIe bus or simple signal filtering are all locked away behind ludicrously overpriced "IP" packages that are often vendor specific.

zozbot234 7y ago
Interacting with a PCIe bus does not seem "mundane" to me. Analog electronics is hard, and, just as importantly, process-specific (and the details of any one process are generally kept strictly confidential to the fab, with tightly-binding NDAs). Now, when it comes to pure digital logic I agree, but that's also where open hardware (with meaningful contributions by SiFive themselves) has been most successful.
- temac 7y ago
  The analog parts of PCIe interfaces are not programmable. The artificially black boxes we are talking about are purely digital. They use fixed resources but we are not asking for the design of those parts.
fwip 7y ago
Why can't a library be IP?
- temac 7y ago
  IP means nothing. It's a poorly defined conglomerate of vastly different laws, like about brands, patents, models, etc. A library is typically "protected" (that is: artificially restricted) by copyright, and the situation is then blurry but in some cases also patents (depending on the region of the world and/or good lawyers knowing the magic words to patent non-patentable things) and trade secrets.
snvzz 7y ago
Hell, I'm glad Symbiflow[0] exists. Once the toolchain is a little more mature, a library of modules with OSHW licenses is bound to pop up, perhaps even integrated into some sort of IDE. [0] https://symbiflow.github.io/ https://symbiflow.github.io/

zozbot234 7y ago

Interacting with a PCIe bus does not seem "mundane" to me. Analog electronics is hard, and, just as importantly, process-specific (and the details of any one process are generally kept strictly confidential to the fab, with tightly-binding NDAs). Now, when it comes to pure digital logic I agree, but that's also where open hardware (with meaningful contributions by SiFive themselves) has been most successful.

temac 7y ago
The analog parts of PCIe interfaces are not programmable. The artificially black boxes we are talking about are purely digital. They use fixed resources but we are not asking for the design of those parts.

fwip 7y ago

Why can't a library be IP?

temac 7y ago
IP means nothing. It's a poorly defined conglomerate of vastly different laws, like about brands, patents, models, etc. A library is typically "protected" (that is: artificially restricted) by copyright, and the situation is then blurry but in some cases also patents (depending on the region of the world and/or good lawyers knowing the magic words to patent non-patentable things) and trade secrets.

snvzz 7y ago

Hell, I'm glad Symbiflow[0] exists. Once the toolchain is a little more mature, a library of modules with OSHW licenses is bound to pop up, perhaps even integrated into some sort of IDE. [0] https://symbiflow.github.io/ https://symbiflow.github.io/