Open Source Processors: Fact Or Fiction?

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Calling an open-source processor free isn't quite accurate.

semiengineering.com, Jul. 27, 2019 – 

Open source processors are rapidly gaining mindshare, fueled in part by early successes of RISC-V, but that interest frequently is accompanied by misinformation based on wishful thinking and a lack of understanding about what exactly open source entails.

Nearly every recent conference has some mention of RISC-V in particular, and open source processors in general, whether that includes keynote speeches, technical sessions, and panels. What's less obvious is that open ISAs are not a new phenomenon, and neither are free, open processor implementations.

"OpenRISC was introduced in 2000 and OpenSPARC has been around since 2006," says Chris Jones, vice president of marketing for Codasip. "These cores, and other freeware peripheral IPs, made their way to FPGAs, demo platforms, prototypes, but never saw any widescale commercial deployment. So is RISC-V any different, or is it OpenSPARC 2.0?"

The answer may depend, in part, on broad changes underway across the semiconductor industry. "With the diminishing of Moore's Law, the only way to improve performance is with customization, which leads to the development of more chip variants," says Raik Brinkmann, president and CEO for OneSpin Solutions. "The open-source nature of RISC-V feeds this paradigm shift."

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