Something different — code up hardware in Google Summer of Code

In 1983, the same year I was born, a company called Altera was founded and created the EP300, their first reprogrammable logic device. The event was considered a major step towards the development of devices we now call “Field Programmable Gate Arrays” or FPGAs for short. In the following 33 years, FPGAs would go from extremely expensive devices found only in high end military and telecommunications equipment, to something even a student can afford.

The EP300 in all it's glory

FPGAs are exciting because they make the development process for hardware the same as software. Developers are able to create designs in a hardware description language (HDL), compile and then use them almost instantly! They make hardware code. Turning hardware into code makes it easy for open source developers to share, collaborate and improve the hardware in ways that would have been extremely hard, or even impossible in the past. 

There were 180 open source organizations accepted to participate in Google Summer of Code 2016 (GSoC), and it is exciting to see several of the organizations using these technologies. I've highlighted some of the different types of hardware coding opportunities in GSoC this year below. (Anything I've missed? Feel free to add it in the comments section below!)

In the area of CPU architectures, OpenRISC and it’s spiritual successor, the RISC-V, are attempting to make a truly open hardware at the most fundamental level. In 2016 you could help this goal via participating in GSoC with either the FOSSi Foundation or lowRISC project.

Not content with the existing HDLs, both the ArchC organization and MyHDL organization (a sub-organization of the Python group), are attempting to make it easier to create these hardware designs. MyHDL is particularly cool because Python is normally considered to be as far away from hardware as you can get.

My own project, TimVideos.us, is using much of the work from these other projects to develop high speed video processing hardware for conference and user group recording (or maybe even video DJing).

Imagine developing hardware in the same way you write code. With FPGAs you can — and GSoC has numerous opportunities to create hardware using this exciting technology. With only 7 days left to submit your application, you better get cracking!

By Tim ‘mithro’ Ansell, Software Engineer on Chrome by day, open source hardware hacker by night