Open Source II

It is late Wednesday afternoon here in Silicon Valley and I should really be developing a new set of materials detailing our current and future products.  However, we had a great set of comments on my previous Open Source post and I thought it appropriate to take a few minutes to respond.

AS Assembler Support A couple of folks noted that the LatticeMico8 is supported by Alfred Arnold's AS Assembler.  I took some time yesterday to look around the AS Assembler site and learned a couple of things:

• Arnold has a great collection of computers.  You can check out the photos on Alfred's personal page.
• The AS Assembler looks like a decent tool and supports the LatticeMico8.

Based on this "extensive" research we went ahead and provided a link to the AS assembler on the LatticeMico8 page.  (That loud noise you can hear is the corporate machinery moving at faster than normal speed.)

Coding Style Some good feedback on coding style and the need for more commenting.  I have already shared this with the key developers.  Over time, we may be able to make some improvements here.  However, pragmatically I expect that the coding will continue to be somewhat Lattice oriented :-)

Development Teams Mood Regarding Open Source There were also some comments on our motivations/thoughts/feelings regarding open source.  As the Lattice team discussed releasing LatticeMico8 as open source, we clearly had in our minds that Lattice is somewhat smaller than our FPGA competitors and that open source would provide us with an opportunity to do something different.  In a way, this development (and hopefully others that follow) is making the FPGA space more "democratic"  with more choices.  This matches what we are doing with the silicon.  All this got me and many of my Lattice colleagues excited.

Lastly if anyone has any LatticeMico8 applications that they would like to share, then let me know.

Comments

[jg]

Good to see the AS link.
Next, you could take a look at http://bleyer.org/pacoblaze/
and check if that compiles OK into lattice devices, and maybe post some notes on what you find, with a link to the pacoblaze website ?

[Juglugs]

The coding style definitely needs to be formalised and more comments added. You cannot have decent open source code unless it is VERY well documented. Also, how does the lattice License reflect the GPL?