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Eclipse Continues to Evolve

Yesterday's EET article today by Richard Goering on Eclipse may have slipped by you. As you may already know, the Eclipse platform supports our LatticeMico32 processor tools, which are often intended for embedded systems applications.

The EET article covers the release (actually three releases) of the Eclipse DSDP "Device Software Development Platform" program.  In a nutshell, the DSDP program is extending the Eclipse open source development environment to make it more suitable for embedded systems development.

Eclipse was originally designed for enterprise systems which don't concern themselves with common embedded systems issues such as communicating with and controlling multiple processing targets.

One of the specific items I was happy to see in the announcement was native support within Eclipse for working with Linux running on a remote embedded target.

Eclipse is open source in a manner which encourages commercial development (the EPL license). Eclipse holds the promise of creating a common development framework that we can all benefit from:

• Reducing the cost of development
• Speeding the release of new products
• Giving a similar look and feel across different toolsets
• Protecting proprietary content

This announcement is very good news as it shows the considerable development momentum that Eclipse has, and that it is going in a good direction for FPGA based embedded systems.

Webcast on open source soft processor for FPGA

It's been a very busy week for me at Lattice, but I wanted to take a moment to tell you about an event you might want to check out on Wednesday.

Wednesday: Free LatticeMico32 Webcast on Open Source, Free Soft Processor
On Wednesday, October 18th, we will be hosting a LatticeMico32 webcast. I was involved in helping to define and launch this 32-bit soft processor that is targeted for FPGAs. Our presenter will be Amr El-Shimi, from the IP marketing group. It’s a free webcast, and you can sign up at the above link. There will be a giveaway of an ispLEVER design software package as well.

If you do get a chance to attend, please let me know what you thought about the webcast. And as I mentioned in my last blog post, I'm still interested in your thoughts on using a soft processor within an FPGA.

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.

Open Source

One Sunday morning during July 2005, I sat at my kitchen table drafting the Lattice Open IP Cores license agreement while my young daughter attempted to sit on my head.  Was it worth the effort?  As to being a human jungle gym, definitely.  With regards to Open Source IP for FPGAs, the jury is still out....   Shortly after crafting the license agreement, we released the LatticeMico8 microcontroller as open source.  I have heard of many examples of customers using this LatticeMico8, which is great.  However, I have not heard much feedback on the Open Source nature of this IP.  I would be interested in reading comments from users on this topic.  Does it make sense to have Open Source IPs for FPGAs?  Should Lattice be doing more of this?