Open Source Takes on Hardware Biz
By Amit Asaravala
Source02:00 AM Dec. 17, 2003 PT
The open-source movement may be giving the software industry a run for its money. But can it do the same for hardware?
According to Damjan Lampret, founder of OpenCores.org, a consortium of developers dedicated to applying open source to hardware design, the answer is a resounding "Yes."
Speaking before a group of 30 representatives from the hardware industry Monday night at the Freedom Technology Center in Mountain View, California, Lampret unveiled the organization's most recent development: a functional system-on-chip microprocessor, developed entirely from freely available open-source blueprints.
The announcement, Lampret claims, marks the first time an organization has bypassed patented technology to manufacture a complete system-on-chip. Such microprocessors are desirable because they contain multiple control units and enable manufacturers to build computers with fewer separate components.
Lampret believes the open-source innovation could lead the hardware industry to develop cheaper and more cutting-edge devices in coming years.
"Hardware has always been very proprietary -- even more so than software," said Lampret in an interview Monday. "But our system-on-chip shows that open-source technology can compete successfully in the hardware space, especially in embedded applications."
Distributed with the belief that technology should be free of patents and licensing fees, open-source software has gone from being a part-time hobby for geeks to an industry-threatening operation over the last decade.
Open-source advocates hope they can achieve the same results in the hardware industry by encouraging device manufacturers to incorporate the blueprints for various OpenCores technologies into their own designs, thus saving them time and money on research and development. This, in turn, is expected to lower the cost of hardware and even boost the development of more open-source software.
"This has the potential to solve a reasonable number of problems for the open-source community," said Bruce Perens, author of the Open Source Definition. "For instance, Linux developers have had trouble getting support from 3-D and Wi-Fi card manufacturers in the past. But now the community has the means to mount an alternative to proprietary hardware."
According to Lampret, a major equipment vendor, which he declined to name, already is considering putting the OpenCores system into mass production.
Despite this, Intel says it is not threatened by the developments.
"The processors that Intel develops are much more complex than what the open-source groups are working on," said Intel spokesman Chuck Malloy. "We're developing chips for high-performance computing, and it seems like they're mostly concerned with low-power embedded devices."
Indeed, the CPU that is currently etched on the OpenCores system-on-chip only runs at 160 MHz and does not yet support floating-point operations -- a necessity for complex mathematical calculations.
In comparison, some of the fastest commercially available Intel Pentium processors are clocked at over 3.2 GHz and have been used in supercomputers that were designed to perform trillions of floating-point operations per second.
Malloy also noted that the goal of developing a full-featured open-source CPU was likely to be hindered by existing hardware patents.
"It's important to keep in mind that there are something like 100,000 patents on today's CPUs," said Malloy. "It would be difficult to build a completely free design for a chip."
Over the past two decades, hardware vendors have rushed to patent even the most basic technological processes. For instance, California-based Cadtrak owns a much-disputed patent on using a simple mathematical operation, known as XOR, to draw a cursor over an image on screen.
Even if an open-source developer came up with the cursor operation through her own tinkering, she could be liable for patent infringement.
And infringement cases are not cheap. According to the American Intellectual Property Law Association, a typical patent case costs anywhere from $500,000 to $2.5 million in fees alone -- funds that a loosely connected group of open-source developers is not likely to have.
Perens, who attended Monday's presentation, admitted that the patents would pose a challenge for the OpenCores developers, but noted that the process of working around a patent sometimes can lead to new technologies.
"With the OpenCores designs, engineers will have the opportunity to do much more tinkering with the hardware than ever before," Perens said. "In a sense, this represents the same kind of change that we saw in 1994 with open-source software. Developers were suddenly given the opportunity to program off the job, on their own time, and just look at the lasting implications that that has had."