The Open Graphics Project (OGP) was founded with the goal to design an

open-source hardware Open-source hardware (OSH, OSHW) consists of physical artifact (software development), 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 th ...

open architecture Open architecture is a type of computer architecture or software architecture intended to make adding, upgrading, and swapping components with other computers easy. For example, the IBM PC, Amiga 2000 and Apple IIe have an open architecture supp ...

and standard for

graphics card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics accelerator, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or colloquially GPU) is a computer expansion card that generates a feed of graphics output to a displa ...

s, primarily targeting

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

operating systems. The project created a reprogrammable development and prototyping board and had aimed to eventually produce a full-featured and competitive end-user graphics card.

OGD1

The project's first product was a PCI graphics card dubbed OGD1, which used a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip. Although the card did not have the same level of performance or functionality as graphics cards on the market at the time, it was intended to be useful as a tool for prototyping the project's first

application-specific integrated circuit An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficienc ...

(ASIC) board, as well as for other professionals needing programmable graphics cards or FPGA-based prototyping boards. It was also hoped that this prototype would attract enough interest to gain some profit and attract investors for the next card, since it was expected to cost around US$2,000,000 to start the production of a specialized ASIC design.

PCI Express PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a high-speed standard used to connect hardware components inside computers. It is designed to replace older expansion bus standards such as Peripher ...

and/or

Mini-PCI Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) is a local computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer and is part of the PCI Local Bus standard. The PCI bus supports the functions found on a processor bus but in a standardized format ...

variations were planned to follow. The OGD1 began shipping in September 2010, some six years after the project began and 3 years after the appearance of the first prototypes. Full specifications will be published and open-source

device driver In the context of an operating system, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabli ...

s will be released. All RTL will be released. Source code to the device drivers and

BIOS In computing, BIOS (, ; Basic Input/Output System, also known as the System BIOS, ROM BIOS, BIOS ROM or PC BIOS) is a type of firmware used to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs and to perform hardware initialization d ...

will be released under the

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

and

BSD licenses BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lice ...

. The RTL (in

Verilog Verilog, standardized as IEEE 1364, is a hardware description language (HDL) used to model electronic systems. It is most commonly used in the design and verification of digital circuits, with the highest level of abstraction being at the re ...

) used for the FPGA and the RTL used for the ASIC are planned to be released under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

(GPL). It has 256

MiB The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

of DDR RAM, is passively cooled, and follows the DDC, EDID, DPMS and VBE VESA standards. TV-out is also planned.

Versioning schema

Versioning schema for OGD1 will go like this: –

OGD1 components

Main components of OGD1 graphics card (shown on the picture) :A) DVI transmitter pair A :B) DVI transmitter pair B :C) 330MHz triple 10-bit DAC (behind) :D) TV chip :E) 2x4 256 megabit

DDR SDRAM Double Data Rate Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DDR SDRAM) is a double data rate (DDR) synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) class of memory integrated circuits used in computers. DDR SDRAM, also retroactively called DDR ...

(front, behind) :F)

Xilinx Xilinx, Inc. ( ) was an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company is renowned for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA). It also pioneered ...

3S4000

FPGA A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is a type of configurable integrated circuit that can be repeatedly programmed after manufacturing. FPGAs are a subset of logic devices referred to as programmable logic devices (PLDs). They consist of a ...

(main chip) :G) Lattice XP10 FPGA (host interface) :H) SPI

PROM A promenade dance or prom is a formal dance party for graduating high school students at the end of the school year. Students participating in the prom will typically vote for a ''prom king'' and ''prom queen''. Other students may be honored ...

1 Mibit :J) SPI PROM 16 Mibit :K) 3x 500 MHz DACs (optional) :L) 64-bit

PCI-X PCI-X, short for Peripheral Component Interconnect eXtended, is a computer bus and expansion card standard that enhances the 32-bit Conventional PCI, PCI local bus for higher Bandwidth (computing), bandwidth demanded mostly by Server (computing ...

edge connector :M) DVI-I connector A and connector B :N)

S-Video S-Video (also known as separate video, Y/C, and erroneously Super-Video) is an analog video signal format that carries standard-definition video, typically at 525 lines or 625 lines. It encodes video luma and chrominance on two separate chann ...

connector :O) 100-pin expansion bus connector

Divisions/terms related to OGP

;Open Graphics Project (OGP):The group of people developing OGA, its written documentation, and its products. ;Open Graphics Architecture (OGA):The trade name for open graphics architectures specified by the Open Graphics Project. ;Open Graphics Development (OGD):The initial FPGA-based experimentation board used as a test platform for TRV ASICs. ;Traversal Technology (TRV):The commercial name for the first ASIC products, based on the Open Graphics Architecture. ;Open Graphics Card (OGC):Graphics cards based on TRV chips. ;Open Hardware Foundation (OHF):A non-profit corporation whose charter is to promote the design and production of open-source and open-documentation hardware.

Current status

The OGP project failed to gain the necessary funding to produce an ASIC version of its card. The project appears to have been discontinued in 2011.

References

External links

The official Open Graphics wiki
archived at the

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by Internet Archive, an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. Launched for public access in 2001, the service allows users to go "back in ...

June 9, 2010 * {{cite news , author = Jeremy Andrews , title = Hardware: Open Graphics Development Board Pricing , publisher = KernelTrap , date = 1 March 2006 , url = http://kerneltrap.org/node/6272 , accessdate = 2006-09-04
Project VGA
– another free graphics core project, aiming at cheaper hardware
Manticore
– an older FPGA-based free graphics core implementation. As of 2009-05-04 no source is available. * The master thesis
An FPGA-based 3D Graphics System
illustrates very well the design decisions to make, while developing a FPGA-based 3D graphics core. * The master thesis
A performance-driven SoC architecture for video synthesis
gives a more complete and hands-on approach of some aspects. Graphics hardware Information technology projects Open hardware electronic devices Open-source hardware Graphics cards