Marcus Erlandsson has been in the semiconductor business since 1998. He started as a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design consultant.
In 2000, he moved into the ASIC development business, and one of the key focus areas of the company he worked for was FPGA-to-ASIC and ASIC-to-ASIC conversion. It was during this period that he identified and began to participate deeply in OpenCores—a Web community which hosts a repository of free, Open Source intellectual property (IP) cores including chip designs, system-on-a-chip and supplemental boards. Erlandsson’s involvement in OpenCores became so deep that it eventually became a part of ORSoC (OpenRISC System-on-Chip)—an FPGA/ASIC design house that he founded with two other colleagues in 2004.
We caught up with Erlandsson on the significance of Open hardware, the OpenCores journey, the business case behind it, how it is benefiting engineers worldwide, and more business and technical doubts that commonly crop up…
JANUARY 2011: Q. What caused the birth of OpenCores.org?
A. OpenCores was started by a Slovenian engineer in 1999. The goal was to design the world’s first Open Source, 32-bit, reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processor licenced under the Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL).
There were just five to ten engineers initially. Today, OpenCores has around 850 maintainers taking care of around 770 projects, and the number is growing rapidly.
Q. Do you notice any significant change in the outlook towards Open Source hardware in recent times? Correspondingly, has the growth of OpenCores.org also accelerated in recent years?
A. Yes, I have been promoting OpenCores and Open Source hardware since 2001 and the acceptance level has really changed since 2006-07. Open Source hardware has got a lot of help from Linux. Linux introduced Open Source into commercial companies and this has helped OpenCores to get acceptance. Also, the fact that ORSoC (a professional design company) is standing behind OpenCores has helped to raise the status of Open Source hardware, as there is the assurance that there is a company offering professional support related to this technology.
Q. Is OpenCores.org for-profit or not-for-profit?
A. I would say a mix of the two. We offer banner advertising on the site, and it has become quite popular amongst global companies within the electronics business. OpenCores also offers a service to help companies find suitable resources, for employment or as consultants. We try to cover the existing costs of running and maintaining the OpenCores servers.
Q. Do you charge for the projects on OpenCores.org?
A. We do not charge anything from our users and there are no costs involved in starting a project at OpenCores. It is also totally free to download and use the different cores available.
Q. Can one use an intellectual property (IP) core from OpenCores.org for a commercial purpose? Does he have to pay any fee? What are the conditions governing use of the IP core?
A. OpenCores advises our users to use the LGPL for their projects, and this licence enables users to use the IP core in commercial projects as well. The GPL can also be used, but it contains a ‘grey zone’ regarding how it affects hardware, as this license was originally designed for software. No fee or royalty is needed for LGPL and GPL IP cores.
Q. If not monetarily, in what other way can users contribute back to OpenCores?
A. It is very important that we share the information on how the different projects (IPs) are being used in different designs, as this provides credibility. It is also important that potential bugs are reported back into the Bugtracker system at OpenCores.
Q. At what stages of system design and development do Open IP cores prove to be most handy?
A. Functionality in hardware is becoming more and more complex, which also means that the verification efforts needed are increasing almost exponentially. So it is very beneficial to release your IP core as Open Source in order to get sufficient verification. Handling all verification internally within a company will become too costly for 90 per cent of the functions—at least for the standard peripheral functions.
Q. At what other stages would Open Sourcing be useful?
A. Open Source IPs do not “lock you in a corner;” this is very important if you have products with a long lifecycle. If the design is 100 per cent Open Source, it is easy to port the design to other hardware technologies. And, if embedded processors are used, it is possible to guarantee exactly the same software behaviour for a future redesign of the product. And, since the software-related costs in today’s products are increasing, this methodology is vital now, so that the engineers can spend time on the next-generation products instead of redesigning old products.
Q. What OpenCores.org is to engineers who are still studying, and what promise does this initiative hold for the electronics industry?
A. OpenCores serves an important role to engineers who want to learn hardware design. The ability to review many different project source codes (VHDL, Verilog, assembler, C) and test methodologies gives the engineers a faster learning curve than inventing everything on their own.
The electronics industry benefits both from increased competency levels as well as the other benefits that come with using Open Source IPs.
