Sun Microsystems has seen the first company build an
open-source chip based on its new Sparc designs. Sun wants to see
third-party developers produce open-source processors that can help
promote its own chip designs.
Simply RISC has shipped the S1 Core, a 64-bit Wishbone-compliant
CPU Core based upon the OpenSPARC T1 microprocessor released by Sun
Microsystems a few months ago.
The new chip is seen as an ideal embedded chip product that can
be used in handheld computers, set-top boxes and digital
cameras.
The S1 Core is released under the same licence of the T1, the
GNU General Public Licence (GPL), and the design is freely
downloadable from the Simply RISC website at
www.srisc.com, with no
registration required.
One of the main aims of Simply RISC was to keep the S1 Core
environment as simple as possible to encourage developers. Most of
the simulation and synthesis activities are now performed with
simple push-button scripts and system requirements are very easy to
meet, said Simply RISC.
The environment can run on any Unix/Linux box and no commercial
tools are required, since both simulation and synthesis of the
Verilog files of the design can be performed using the free
software Icarus Verilog.
Due to its Wishbone-compliant bus interface the S1 Core can be
easily interconnected to several cores freely available on
OpenCores.org to build up a System-on-a-Chip.
With the collaborative nature of the GPL licence, Simply RISC
plans to add new features to the S1 Core and test them extensively
over the next few months with the help of the open-source
community.
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