Claire Xen  🏳️‍⚧️ 🏳️‍🌈 🧙🏻‍♀️ BLM  🏴 🚩

I might be mistaken, I haven't checked in the last year or so, but Lattice's parts aren't open hardware. On the other hand, for Arduino it is very important to be sure that the efforts we make when manufacturing boards (and we make many boards) are backed by part availabilty

please show me a single Atmel, ST, or Intel chip that is open hardware

sure, but I thought this was not the discussion, or was it? I was just pointing it out ;-)

From the project survival point of view, and from the perspective of being able of serving as many people as possible, our approach has been making a hw agnostic toolchain. The same that Verilog or VHDL tools are for FPGAs.

So, while the ICE approach has been making a tool that works on certain hardware that had to be hacked, our hack was to make a toolchain that runs on anything programmed in C. And then we can go on an endless rant about how open is open or that is more open.

A lot of this discussion seems like it's based on a misconception. The open toolchains don't use any exploits or clever tricks to run bitstreams on these FPGAs. Instead, it was just discovered what the bits in the FPGA configuration mean, so open source tools can configure them.

I agree with this, this is my definition of "hacking" It is not like there was a datasheet people had access to and could use to write the tool to do the bitstream generation or was it? I think this shows a tremendous skill and I totally respect that, I wish I had done it :-)

What I would like to have is a datasheet from whatever manufacturer backing up the work and opening up for anyone to make the port to their hardware. I wish this will happen sooner than later.