[ LUGOS ] Free 32-bit processor core hits the Net

[Igor Furlan]

Before the end of this month, engineers 
should be able to download VHDL
description files and documentation 
for the OpenRISC 1000 core over the
Internet at no charge. Engineers can 
already download a C language compiler
free. 
Nonetheless, analysts say the offering, 
and others like it, may eventually
alter the semiconductor IP landscape 
as radically as Linux has transformed the
operating-systems market.

Damjan Lampret, a 22-year-old computer 
science student at the University of
Ljubljana, Slovenia, is one of the 
forces behind www.opencores.org and a
designer of the OpenRISC architecture. 
"We are modeling ourselves on the Free
Software Foundation. We're trying to 
work in a similar way," he said, speaking
over the telephone from 
Ljubljana, Slovenia, central Europe. 

In the last two months of 1999, Lampret 
and his co-workers designed the 32-bit
microprocessor architecture that they 
call OpenRISC 1000, or OR1K. Lampret
also ported the GNU C-compiler to the 
OpenRISC architecture and is making them
both available on the Internet. An OpenRISC 
prototyping board comprises a Xilinx FPGA 
and Xilinx programmable-logic device. 

"OR1K is small and quite fast. It occupies 
about 70 percent of the smallest Xilinx Virtex 
gate array, which they label as 50k gates, and runs at about 100
MHz," said Lampret. 

The design first ran compiled C code 
on the prototype board late on Dec. 31,
he said, communicating some of the 
excitement he felt at the time. "Exactly
before midnight on New Year's night, 
OR1K executed its first instructions -
actually, several millions of them." 

more info here:
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000228S0007