OpenCores is a loose community of people who are interested in developing open source hardware (digital hardware) through electronic design automation, with a similar ethos to the free software movement. OpenCores hope to eliminate redundant design work and slash development costs. Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... Open source hardware refers to computer, or electronics, hardware and even now other sorts of manufactured goods, that are designed in the same fashion as open-source software. ... A digital system is one that uses discrete numbers, especially binary numbers, or non-numeric symbols such as letters or icons, for input, processing, transmission, storage, or display, rather than a continuous spectrum of values (an analog system). ... Hardware is the general term that is used to describe physical artifacts of a technology. ... PCB Layout Program Electronic design automation (EDA) is the category of tools for designing and producing electronic systems ranging from printed circuit boards (PCBs) to integrated circuits. ... Ethos (ἦθος) is a Greek word originally meaning the place of living that can be translated into English in different ways. ... The free software movement began in 1983 when Richard Stallman announced the GNU project. ...

The components produced by the OpenCores initiative use several different software licenses, but the most common is GNU LGPL, which states that any modifications to a component must be shared with the community, while you can still use it together with proprietary components. A software license is a legal agreement which may take the form of a proprietary or gratuitous license as well as a memorandum of contract between a producer and a user of computer software. ... GNU logo The GNU Lesser General Public License (formerly the GNU Library General Public License) is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation. ...

The library will consist of design elements from processors, memory controllers, peripherals, motherboards, and other components. Emerging semicon manufacturers could use the information and license designs for free. Processor can mean: A central processing unit of a computer. ... The memory controller is a chip on a computers motherboard which manages the flow of data going to and from the memory. ... A peripheral is a type of computer hardware that is added to a host computer in order to expand its abilities. ... A motherboard, also known as a mainboard, system board, or logic boards on Apple Computers, and sometimes abbreviated as mobo (generally credited to the magazine Maximum PC) is the central or primary circuit board making up a complex electronic system, such as a modern computer. ... A semiconductor is a solid whose electrical conductivity can be controlled over a wide range, either permanently or dynamically. ...

Currently the emphasis is on digital modules called 'cores', commonly known as IP Cores. The components are used for creating both custom integrated circuits (ASICs) and FPGAs. In electronic design a semiconductor intellectual property core, IP block, or IP core is a reusable unit of logic, cell, or chip layout design and is also the property of one party. ... Integrated circuit showing memory blocks, logic and input/output pads around the periphery A monolithic integrated circuit (also known as IC, microchip, silicon chip, computer chip or chip) is a miniaturized electronic circuit (consisting mainly of semiconductor devices, as well as passive components) that has been manufactured in the surface... This article does not cite its references or sources. ... An Altera FPGA with 20,000 cells. ...

The cores are implemented in the hardware description languages Verilog, VHDL or SystemC which may be synthesized to either silicon or grid arrays. In electronics, a hardware description language or HDL is any language from a class of computer languages for formal description of electronic circuits. ... Verilog is a hardware description language (HDL) used to model electronic systems. ... VHDL or VHSIC Hardware Description Language, is commonly used as a design-entry language for FPGAs and ASICs in electronic design automation of digital circuits. ... SystemC is often thought of as a hardware description language like VHDL and Verilog, but is more aptly described as a system description language, since it exhibits its real power at the behaviour level of modelling. ...

The project aims at using a common non-proprietary system bus named Wishbone, and most components are nowadays adapted to this bus. In computer architecture, a bus is a subsystem that transfers data or power between computer components inside a computer or between computers and typically is controlled by device driver software. ... The Wishbone Bus is an open source hardware computer bus intended to let the parts of an integrated circuit communicate with each other. ...

Among the components created by OpenCores contributors are:

• OpenRISC - a highly configurable RISC central processing unit
• A Zilog Z80 clone
• USB 2.0 controller
• Tri Ethernet controller, 10/100/1000 Mbit
• Encryption units, for example DES, AES & RSA
• HyperTransport Tunnel
• A PIC16F84 core

OpenRISC is an open source hardware RISC CPU design by OpenCores released under the GNU Lesser General Public License. ... Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), is a microprocessor CPU design philosophy that favors a smaller and simpler set of instructions that all take about the same amount of time to execute. ... CPU redirects here. ... One of the first Z80 microprocessors manufactured; the date stamp says well before July 1976. ... The USB (Type A and B) Connectors A USB Series “A” plug Universal Serial Bus (USB) is a serial bus standard to interface devices. ... Ethernet is a large and diverse family of frame-based computer networking technologies for local area networks (LANs). ... // In cryptography, encryption is the process of obscuring information to make it unreadable without special knowledge. ... The Data Encryption Standard (DES) is a cipher (a method for encrypting information) selected as an official Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) for the United States in 1976, and which has subsequently enjoyed widespread use internationally. ... In cryptography, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), also known as Rijndael, is a block cipher adopted as an encryption standard by the U.S. government. ... In cryptology, RSA is an algorithm for public-key encryption. ... HyperTransport logo HyperTransport (HT), formerly known as Lightning Data Transport (LDT), is a bidirectional serial/parallel high-bandwidth, low-latency computer bus that was introduced on April 2, 2001 [1]. The HyperTransport Technology Consortium is in charge of promoting and developing HyperTransport technology. ... PIC microcontrollers in DIP and QFN packages PIC is a family of RISC microcontrollers made by Microchip Technology, derived from the PIC1650 originally developed by General Instruments Microelectronics Division. ...

References

See also

• Open content

Open content, coined by analogy with open source, (though technically it is actually share-alike) describes any kind of creative work including articles, pictures, audio, and video that is published in a format that explicitly allows the copying of the information. ...

External links

• Official Website