Keywords :

• Freedom CPU
• copylefted hardware
• F-CPU
• Free Hardware
• microprocessor design
• VHDL

Contents :

• Motivations
• Activities
• What is F-CPU ?
• Linguistic barreers
• Links
• Administrativia
• Schedule

Motivations :

The F-CPU Project was kindly invited by the LSM team during the Linux Expo 2002 in Paris. Pierre Jarillon was enthusiastic and curious about the idea of transposing software concepts (copyleft, distribution) to the Hardware world.

As you can see at the OpenCollector project database, F-CPU is only one of the many projects that develop "soft cores" following the GNU and Linux principles, though each project has specific points of view. The F-CPU team wishes to discuss about them and invites other teams. To emphasize this openness, the topic which was initially named "Libre CPU" is now "Libre Hardware", in order to not sound "F-CPU centric". We believe that we belong to a wider movement, that can be called "Free Hardware" (a counterpart of the "Free Software" movement) or "Open Hardware", depending on one's tastes. If you abide to this trend, you are highly welcome.

During this 5-day meeting, we wish to tighten the links between hardware and software developpers, who often face the same problems and live in the same world. The "Free Software" explosion offers new collaboration opportunities and we can all benefit from them, with a bit of responsibility and good will.

Unfortunately, at this time of writing, no other project has wished to participate and come. If you think that this topic is actually F-CPU centric, it is not the team's fault since nobody answered to our calls for participation.

Activities

There is not yet any schedule for the 5-days gathering. You will find the latest changes in this page. We will follow the general schedule when it comes to the plenary sessions, but expect some loosely timely working sessions and some endless sleepless nights if you're enthusiastic :-D

We hope that as many people as possible can come because we have a lot to do during this short time :

• We wish we can make a plenary session to introduce the project to newcomers. F-CPU and "Free Hardware" is not an elit's matter and everybody is concerned, especially "Free Software" writers. It is not yet known whether a plenary session will take place, but it will certainly take place somewhere anyway. At least, it will be announced during the main opening plenary session.
• The introduction will be followed by more technical presentations for the people who are interested mainly by the hacking side. Demonstrations and hands-on tutorials are also planned but not yet scheduled.
• We wish to discuss about the licensing issues with the "law" topic. F-CPU currently uses the GNU GPL but it is not adapted to VHDL source code. A F-CPU license is planned but participation of other Free Hardware projects could help spend less efforts and create a one-fits-all "Free Hardware License".
• Of course, intense working sessions are going to happen : the manual's revamp, the F-CPU source tree reorganisation and many other hot topics will be treated, just like on the mailing lists but faster and with more people.
• Another hot topic is "How to design Free Hardware source code with the existing tools ?" and we will introduce participants to the use of VHDL tools.
• The software side of the F-CPU is also an important subtopic : what tools, what approaches and what do we have to rewrite from scratch ? what methods and coding practices are necessary for this 3rd millenium architecture ?
• Finally, the french "F-CPU association" will hold its first meeting.

You are welcome to propose other topics and present a paper.

What is F-CPU ?

The Freedom CPU project is a distributed, international team of hackers, computer architects and electronicians who have the goal to design a family of microprocessor cores and the necessary basic tools to make it useful.

The programming model of a member of the F-CPU family is SIMD, superpipelined RISC with 64 registers and a simple and orthogonal instruction set. The current core is called "FC0" (it stands for "F-CPU Core 0") and is designed using industry-standard VHDL'93 coding practices and tools.

The design itself is aimed at high configuration, straight-forward retargetting (technological portability), and can be compiled in a similar fashion to a Linux kernel or a GNU tool. All the sources, documentations and utilities are distributed with a copyleft license which emphasises on unencumbered development practices : patent-free features, widely-used standard conformant sources, freely or easily available tools. Anybody should be able to contribute.

To sum up these principles :

Linguistic barreers

Most F-CPU contributors are french and it's probable that most discussions will occur in this language. However, most of us are more or less fluent in english so don't hesitate to contact us, even if you don't speak french. We will be happy to communicate with you.

Links

The homepage of the F-CPU project is located at http://www.f-cpu.org but nobody has had the courage to update it for a while.

The freshest source files and working snapshots can be found at http://f-cpu.seul.org/new. It is a http mirror of a simple ftp site. We are too lazy to make a nice web site and all the volunteers for this task have not done anything more. If you want to help us, you are highly welcome :-)

A nice french page written by the french manual's translator : http://philippe.trbich.free.fr/pub/fcpu/indexfcpu.html

Administrativia

This page was written ven mai 24 21:57:21 GMT 2002 and last updated monday june 3 05:46:22 GMT 2002 by Yann Guidon, it is going to evolve at an unpredictable rate. Your comments are welcome. Thanks to Pierre, Carmen and François !

Schedule

Thursday, July 11th

14:00 - 16:00

Presentation of the F-CPU project , by Yann GUIDON

ENSEIRB Amphi A