January 20, 2004 - Bus & Board Conference / Long Beach, CA - USA. Silicore Corporation announced today the release of a VMEbus to PCI Bridge System-on-Chip under open source licensing. The bridge system is provided as a VHDL soft core, and is intended to run on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chips.
The bridge SoC is released under the GNU Lesser GPL License (LGPL). Under that license anybody can download, use and modify the bridge code without any royalties or other fees. According to Wade Peterson, President of Silicore, "This bridging system uses a dual, internal WISHBONE System-on-Chip bus. They are organized as 16-slot backplanes with shared memory blocks. The memory blocks can be replaced with other off-the-shelf core functions, such as those available from the OpenCores organization. This is a very nice, modular structure where the System-on-Chip acts like a modular VMEbus system."
In a related move, Silicore also announced its support for a new initiative called OpenVME. This is a community development program aimed at creating and promoting VMEbus interface IP. Peterson added that: "We think this strategy will foster development of whole new interface technologies. This will be done through community code development much like we see in the GNU/Linux world. In order to get things rolling, Silicore is releasing this bridge system under the LGPL license. This thing could serve as 'seed code' for the development of other interfaces."
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