ICALEPCS 2013 pre-conference Open Hardware Workshop
After the success of the 2011 workshop, this one will take place in San Francisco on Sunday 6 October 2013. Please subscribe to the mailing list if you want to participate in the discussions about the organization of the workshop or just be kept up to date. Registration for the workshop is open: please use this link to register. For any questions regarding the workshop, you can contact Javier Serrano.
Preliminary (almost final) program
Session 1: Intro and Legal Aspects
A general intro talk. OH concepts, the current state of affairs, etc.
Knowledge Transfer at CERN, with a focus on Open Hardware. Giovanni Anelli, head of CERN KT (pre-recorded talk and remote Q&A).
OH licensing, John Ackermann (pre-recorded talk and remote Q&A). Try to place this talk somewhere between 11:00 and 14:00 PST.
Session 2: Experience in institutes and companies
CERN's experience.
LNLS's experience.
Soleil's experience.
Creotech.
Session 3: Tools
A talk about Kicad status and future prospects.
Icarus Verilog status and future prospects. Steve Williams, 30 min.
I will talk about the current language support for Icarus Verilog, as
well as plans for future support. This will include what languages are
supported, which are priorities, and I will also cover how the languages
interact in elaboration and simulation.
I will also discuss how to participate in the process and/or influence
development
priorities.
libre-fda-tool).
CERN might be ready with a talk about a tool to create HDL filters automatically (Migen. Sébastien Bourdeauducq, 30 min.
Despite being faster than schematics entry, hardware design with Verilog
and VHDL remains tedious and inefficient for several reasons. The
event-driven model introduces issues and manual coding that are
unnecessary for synchronous circuits. Counter-intuitive arithmetic rules
result in steeper learning curves and provide a fertile ground for
subtle bugs in designs. Finally, support for procedural generation of
logic (metaprogramming) is very limited and restricts the ways code can
be made generic, reused and organized.
To address those issues, we have developed the Migen FHDL library that
replaces the event-driven paradigm with the notions of combinatorial and
synchronous statements, has arithmetic rules that make integers always
behave like mathematical integers, and most importantly allows the
design's logic to be constructed by a Python program. This last point
enables hardware designers to take advantage of the richness of the
Python language - object oriented programming, function parameters,
generators, operator overloading, libraries, etc. - to build well
organized, reusable and elegant designs.
Other Migen libraries are built on FHDL and provide various tools such
as a system-on-chip interconnect infrastructure, a dataflow programming
system, a more traditional high-level synthesizer that compiles Python
routines into state machines with datapaths, and a simulator that allows
test benches to be written in
Python.
VPCIE, an open source PCIe device virtualization framework developed at the ESRF.
Daniel:
- Some kind of more structured "round table" where we could explicitly see the open and key points of OH and discuss them. Maybe we could define a set of fundamental questions and propose them to the audience.
- Set a permanent and unified space to discuss any kind of Controls HW for Physics/Large Experiments subjects. Conferences are great to put people together, expose latest advances and promote discussions, but these roles could be complemented by a virtual counterpart where the discussions can be tracked by anyone anywhere at any time in the future. The workshop videos could be put online and open for comments so as to give a broader reach to the talks.
Steve:
- I think we might want to carve out a little time at the end of the Tools session for unstructured interaction between the tool authors (those that are present) and users, current and potential.
Javier:
- We could reserve some time to discuss funding models for FOSS tools for HW development.
Files
- restaurants.pdf
- oh_intro.pdf
- migen_icalepcs.pdf
- OpenPET--_A_Flexible_Open_Source_Electronics_System_20131004.pptx
- ICALEPCS_2013_Libre-FDATool.pdf
- icalepcs_kicad.pdf
- ICALECPS_2013_Icarus_Verilog.pdf
- vpcie.pdf
- 2013_10_06_ICALEPCS_OHW.pptx
- presentation_kt.mp3
- LNLSs_experience_with_Open_Hardware.pdf
- soleil.pdf
- TAPR_Open_Hardware_License__10-2013.odp
- Ackermann_OHL_Presentation_10-2013.mp4
- oh_cern_talk.pdf