Open Source Hardware:

Hacking Silicon for Fun

(instead of profit)

Or, How to do precision farming on Mars

 

Troy Benjegerdes, Systems We Love, Minneapolis MN

Soybeans
Corn
Silicon

Soybeans - 1:30
Corn - Hybrid seed
Silicon

Self Replicating

$Billions

Where's my reprap (or self-repairing tractor)

I can grow soybeans in soil, and save the seeds. Corn makes PLA, and I can print parts for a 3-D printer to print a bigger printer to make a mold to replace the broken part in my tractor to plant more corn to grow more PLA

Still needs a CPU

Both the tractor and the printer need a processor. I don't have a spare $30 million to buy the local silicon foundry (fab).

But some fabs might have idle production capacity (SkyWater Technology)?

If you code it,
will you fab it?

If you code it,
will they fab it?

Hardware is just code, at least at the beginning

  • Verilog
  • VHDL
  • SystemC
  • <insert new thing here>

NodeJS for hardware?

Hardware is inherently parallel and asynchronous... It might work.

Crazier things have been done, and gone viral, with low-enough barriers to entry.

Verilog for seriousity

Most popular 'hardware' language. lots of stuff on opencores

Tools

  • QFlow
  • Yosys
  • Magic VLSI
  • icarus verilog
  • SPICE
  • KiCAD

Business

Ecosystems

Open source IN SPACE

# wget http://www.gaisler.com/products/grlib/grlib-gpl-1.5.0-b4164.tar.gz

# tar zxvf grlib-gpl-1.5.0-b4164.tar.gz

# cd grlib-gpl-1.5.0-b4164

# make ??? # hrrm, time to fork, needs a new target

Martian Farmers, or Farming Mars?

If we can make Silicon, space is easy.

Thank you for listening to what I love talking about

troy-si@7el.us / troy@bloq.com