Expanding the Eclipse Foundation Ecosystem With Open Source Hardware

In October, the Open Hardware Group (OpenHW Group) announced plans to join the Eclipse Foundation, and will be transitioning into the OpenHW Foundation by the end of the year. This integration highlights a long-standing collaboration and represents a transformative step for both the open source hardware and software communities.

Hardware and software, obviously, are closely related. But the origins, growth, and development of the open hardware movement, its relationship to open software, and the implications of bringing the two together are more complex than they appear at first glance. 

The role of the OpenHW Group is very similar to that of the Eclipse Foundation. It acts as a curator for open source materials in its particular domain, namely hardware, mainly focused on RISC-V, an open source, fifth-generation Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) architecture. 

What Is Open Source Hardware?

Hardware, of course, is adjacent to software but not directly analogous, and so open source hardware is adjacent but not analogous to open source software. Our open source artefacts mainly consist of three things:

1. Design Implementations. This can take many forms, and is usually provided in the form of something called an RTL model, which looks like software but isn’t.
2. User Documentation.
3. Functional Verification Environments.

Those last two items set hardware apart from software.  Many have argued that high-quality software does not require documentation. One reason for this is that the source code for software is primarily a description of its function. Often, this is not the case for hardware, which must also deal with non-functional aspects of the implementation. For these reasons, good quality open source hardware must also come with good-quality documentation and be thoroughly verified.

The incentives to participate in open source hardware are really the same as they are in open software. In short, it allows organisations to reduce and offset development costs and focus on innovation. Much like the Eclipse Foundation and open source communities in general, we tend to say open hardware is free, as in freedom to innovate, not as in free beer. 

RISC-V: The Spark That Ignited Open Source Hardware

It might be surprising to hear that the open source hardware movement has been around for some time — at least 20 years. But for a very long time, it was rather limited to small, fragmentary groups that would advocate for it without anything much happening beyond that. There was nothing really for the movement to coalesce around. 

RISC-V changed everything. This was the fifth-generation RISC architecture to come out of the University of California at Berkeley and it was the spark that started the flame. Open source hardware really took off when it came out around a decade ago, and even today, much of the open source hardware ecosystem is centred on RISC-V. 

This was more than just beneficial for the open hardware movement. It also came at the right time for processor innovation in general. 

The Collapse of Moore’s Law Skyrocketed RISC-V Architecture

For a long time, the computing industry was flying along with Moore’s law. Just making processors smaller and faster was as good as innovating, because you were getting vastly improved performance with each new semiconductor technology node.

RISC-V came along at a time when Moore’s law was no longer valid and the industry needed to start innovating to achieve the desired performance improvements. The open source RISC-V specification gave the industry the freedom to innovate just when it was needed.

This dovetailed perfectly with the explosion of processor usage in devices. RISC-V technology is now embedded into a broad range of products, from electric toothbrushes to smartphones to electric drills and home furnaces. Whether it’s an Apple or Android machine, your smartphone probably has multiple, small, embedded RISC-V processors in it, managing such things as the touchscreen or radio-modem. Today we are seeing the first generation of desktop and laptop PCs based on RISC-V processors and, in the near future, we will see RISC-V processors move into the datacentre and (of course) AI.

Why precisely RISC-V proved to be a flashpoint for open hardware is still open to debate, and many people have many different theories. But what seems completely clear is that it was, and its release saw open source hardware take off. 

OpenHW Group and Eclipse Foundation Have a Long Relationship

It’s worth noting that the relationship between our two groups is nothing new. When the OpenHW Group got started in 2019, we had an arrangement with the Eclipse Foundation from day one. 

The reality was that despite the open hardware movement, in general, being of a similar pedigree to the open software movement, software had a significant lead on us from an organisational standpoint. 

So, we partnered with the Eclipse Foundation for two main reasons. First, was that the foundation knew how to organise this type of not-for-profit and handle the administrative processes. Second, was that the foundation had established processes for facilitating development by its members. These would need to be adapted for the differences between hardware and software, of course, but that gave us a template to work from, which was very helpful. 

Seamlessly Merging Hardware and Software 

We’ve achieved remarkable progress since our inception five years ago. Membership has grown into the hundreds, and our designs are behind hundreds of millions of units in production. This momentum positions us perfectly to integrate the open hardware movement into the open software community. The reality is that open hardware is now going through some of the growing pains that the open software industry has spent the last 30 years sorting out. But for us, it’s happening much more quickly, and there are significant benefits to leveraging the expertise and experience of an organisation like the Eclipse Foundation. 

The hope is that the open hardware and software movements can grow together, ideally to the point where we talk about them in the same breath. I think the greatest potential for the future of open hardware is to grow within this context, and hopefully as it expands and becomes even more mature, it can branch out beyond processors as well. While processors are important and useful, they’re far from the only piece of hardware that could benefit from open sourcing. 

This said, we’re also looking to expand what we do with processors. There are really two pieces to that puzzle: the processor itself and the low-level resources needed to manage the applications running on it. Those kinds of partnerships represent a real opportunity for the hardware and software communities to come together on merged projects that build completely open source solutions with both sides of the equation. One effort is underway to integrate a port of the Eclipse ThreadX real-time operation system (RTOS) with an open RISC-V processor core to accomplish exactly that. 

This is also a great opportunity for the two movements to get to know each other better. Certainly, in the open hardware community, the role and function of open software is still a bit murky to many. And it’s also true that the open software community is not necessarily aware of the value open hardware can provide. 

Microchips are a great example, since they can be bought so cheaply once they’ve been developed. But developing the first new microchip can literally cost $100 million or more. So, as we integrate into the Eclipse Foundation, I think it’ll be extremely beneficial for our respective movements to learn from and about each other to better understand how we can work together and help each other most effectively. We’re looking forward to the journey!