Re: [ox] Die Anwendbarkeit der Werttheorie in der Informatik
- From: graham belegost.mit.edu
- Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 04:46:08 -0500 (EST)
In electronics - well: chip design - there is currently a strong
tendency to use more and more so called FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate
Array) and relatives. These are devices which in some sense bring
software closer to hardware. In fact a (complex) FPGA is something
like a universal chip. It gets its universality by the fact that the
concrete hardware function the device executes is programmed into it
immediately before it is used. Clearly such a beast is an important
device for our discussions and thoughts.
Because of mass production I'd expect the price of such devices drops
in the future and thus the abilities to have Free hardware in the
sense of Free chips.
Yes and no. This is something where the discussion on use relative
to society is highly relevant. People have been hoping for developments
such as you describe for some years. And in fact there are groups
working on designs for FPGAs (eg OpenCores). BUT commercial users
of such chips are very worried that their designs may be too easily
copied. As a result, they put pressure on the FPGA manufacturers
to make it difficult to get at the internals of the chips. The
manufacturers are happy to co-operate for their own reasons. The result
is that the internal data format for FPGAs is a secret. No-one can write
free software to program the chips (the manufacturers do release
some 'free beer' programs to do this). There was one FPGA design
which was inherently open - the programming data from the chip could
be read and changed at any time from a normal processor bus. The
company which made it was bought by Xilinx (the Microsoft of the
FPGA world) and production closed after a couple of years. There
are no other FPGAs with this property, and Xilinx are very aggressive
about their patents (they just won a patent case against their
nearest competitor, Altera). This makes it difficult to think about
producing a 'free' FPGA (quite apart from the fact that no-one
has yet produced a free IC of any type, though some groups are
trying. Free electronic design groups are split over whether it
is possible to produce free designs using non-free software (I
guess the majority opinion is 'yes').
Graham
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