Free Silicon Foundation @fsi@mastodon.f-si.org

The 35th Chaos Communication Congress, #35C3, ended few days ago. All talks can be seen at
https://media.ccc.de/c/35c3
and browsed by theme:
https://halfnarp.events.ccc.de/

A small selection about #silicon and place-and-route tools:

LibreSilicon - decentralizing semiconductor manufacturing
https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9410-libresilicon

The nextpnr FOSS FPGA place-and-route tool
https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9612-the_nextpnr_foss_fpga_place-and-route_tool

Where can you download, modify and share a silicon IP block just like you do, say, with gcc?

Nowhere.

The licenses of mainstream proprietary silicon CAD tools explicitly forbid publishing anything created with them. This is partially due to keep algorithms, such as place-and-route, more secret.

It is like writing a book with a proprietary word processor and then not having permission to publish it for not revealing how the grammar checker works.

Free silicon requires free CAD tools.

#Introductions

We are proud to announce the birth of the Free Silicon Foundation (https://f-si.org)!

We organize a conference in Paris, March 14-16 2019, to promote:

1. Free and Open Source (FOS) CAD tools for designing #VLSI circuits
2. the sharing of hardware designs
3. common standards
4. the freedom of users in the context of #silicon technology

Program and submissions:
https://wiki.f-si.org/index.php/FSiC2019

#Hardware #FSiC