Platform based on open-source cores for industrial applications

The latest version of the international technology roadmap for semiconductors predicts that design reuse will be essential in the near future to face the constantly increasing design complexity. The concept comes from software engineering in which reuse is a fundamental technology. In order to provide libraries and applications to reuse in software development, some open-source initiatives (e.g. Linux, gcc, X, mysql) have appeared during the last decades. The basic idea is to distribute the library or application source code (normally free-of-charge) and allow any developer to use, modify, debug and improve it. Several initiatives have tried to port this idea to hardware development. The main goal of this paper is to develop a synthesizable platform described in SystemC from an open architecture. The platform includes a CPU (OpenRISC) and some basic peripherals. A set of software development tools (compiler, assembler, debugger) and RTOS (eCos) has also been developed. This work enables the evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of the open-source model in electronic system design.