[Cryptech Tech] fyi: Project Aims To Build a Fully Open SoC and Dev Board

[Joachim Strömbergson]

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Aloha!

Randy Bush wrote:
> interesting project.  are you suggesting this as a core for upper
> layers of cryptech?

No, this would be a platform primarily for implementing the lower
layers. But it could possible used to implement the whole cake.

This is an alternative to the OpenRISC platform with its set of peripherals.

I've briefly looked at the ISA and architeture and think it looks
promising. Compared to OpenRISC it does not come with delay slots and
such warts.

What I can't find is what they mean with 'a permissible license'. Does
that imply GPL-something or BSD/Apache-something?

Good things are that they are actively developing the SW toolchain and
seem to have clang+llvm as well as gcc working for the ISA. Also they
aim to support both FPGAs and ASICs which is in line with what we do.

A less positive thing is that the current CPU cores are implemented in a
non-standard HW description language called Chisel (from Berkeley):
http://riscv.org/download.html#tab_chisel

It is probably very cool (based on Scala no less). But in order to
integrate with our cores or any other third party cores a wrapper needs
to be added. Or converting the Chisel code to Verilog or VHDL on some
level (RTL or gate level). I haven't checked yet but I'm confident
somebody have considered this and there is probably a solution
available. But not using std language shows the heritage - the SoC
project and the processor comes from research projects in university
environments.

The short version though is that this could benefit us by providing us
with a base platform (HW and SW) so that we can focus on the Cryptech
specific functionality. But currently the status of these projects seems
to be very early and we should probably wait and see what happens before
jumping on the bandwagon.

I'll sign up on the maillists for the projects.

- -- 
Med vänlig hälsning, Yours

Joachim Strömbergson - Alltid i harmonisk svängning.
========================================================================
 Joachim Strömbergson          Secworks AB          joachim at secworks.se
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