OpenCores is a community developing digital

open-source hardware Open-source hardware (OSH) consists of physical artifacts of technology designed and offered by the open-design movement. Both free and open-source software (FOSS) and open-source hardware are created by this open-source culture movement and a ...

through

electronic design automation Electronic design automation (EDA), also referred to as electronic computer-aided design (ECAD), is a category of software tools for designing Electronics, electronic systems such as integrated circuits and printed circuit boards. The tools wo ...

(EDA), with a similar ethos as the

free software movement The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run the software, to study the software, to modify the software, and to share copies of the s ...

. OpenCores hopes to eliminate redundant design work and slash development costs. A number of companies have been reported as adopting OpenCores IP in chips,Andrew Orlowski, "Flextronics demos open source chips", ''The Register'', 12 December 2003

/ref> or as adjuncts to EDA tools. OpenCores is also cited from time to time in the electronics press as an example of open source in the electronics hardware community. OpenCores has always been a commercially owned organization. In 2015, the core active users of OpenCores established the independent

Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation The Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation (FOSSi Foundation) is a non-profit foundation with the mission to promote and assist free and open digital hardware designs and their related ecosystems. It was set up by the core OpenRISC development t ...

(FOSSi Foundation), and registered the libreCores.org website as the basis for all future development, independent of commercial control.

History

Damjan Lampret, one of the founders of OpenCores, stated on his website that it began in 1999. The first public record of the new website and its objectives was in ''EE Times'' in 2000. Then

CNET ''CNET'' (short for "Computer Network") is an American media website that publishes reviews, news, articles, blogs, podcasts, and videos on technology and consumer electronics globally. ''CNET'' originally produced content for radio and televi ...

News reported in 2001. Through the following years it was supported by advertising and sponsorship, including by Flextronics. In mid-2007 an appeal was put out for a new backer, and that November, Swedish design house ORSoC AB agreed to take over maintenance of the OpenCores website. ''EE Times'' reported in late 2008 that OpenCores had passed the 20,000 subscriber mark. In October 2010 it reached 95,000 registered users and had approximately 800 projects. In July 2012 it reached 150,000 registered users. During 2015, ORSoC AB formed a joint venture with KNCMiner AB to develop bitcoin mining machines. As this became the primary focus of the business, they were able to spend less time with the opencores.org project. In response to the growing lack of commitment, the core

OpenRISC OpenRISC is a project to develop a series of open-source hardware based central processing units (CPUs) on established reduced instruction set computer (RISC) principles. It includes an instruction set architecture (ISA) using an open-source licen ...

development team set up the

(FOSSi), and registered th
librecores.org
website as the basis for all future development, independent of commercial control.

Licensing

In the absence of a widely accepted open source hardware license, the components produced by the OpenCores initiative use several different

software license A software license is a legal instrument (usually by way of contract law, with or without printed material) governing the use or redistribution of software. Under United States copyright law, all software is copyright protected, in both source ...

s. The most common is the

GNU LGPL The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

, which states that any modifications to a component must be shared with the community, while one can still use it together with

proprietary {{Short pages monitor