<story><title>Darpa Plans a Major Remake of U.S. Electronics</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/darpas-planning-a-major-remake-of-us-electronics-pay-attention.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>iamleppert</author><text>From the article: &amp;quot;It’s pretty rare to go to GitHub, find high-quality hardware blocks that are available, and have the verification tools and everything you would need to trust that, even though that block has been altered by many different designers, it is in a state that is useable for your design.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;And so they are giving money to the likes of Intel, Nvidia, Synopsis, Xilinx? The reason why there is very little open source hardware is because it isn&amp;#x27;t in those company&amp;#x27;s interests.&lt;p&gt;I won&amp;#x27;t hold my breath, I think this is just government appropriations and a lot of self-congratulating kick-off conferences that won&amp;#x27;t amount to anything useful. We&amp;#x27;re more likely to get open hardware the same way it always has started -- from the community, not from corporations. They will only adopt it when they have no other choice.</text></comment>
<story><title>Darpa Plans a Major Remake of U.S. Electronics</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/darpas-planning-a-major-remake-of-us-electronics-pay-attention.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>blueintegral</author><text>This is really exciting. I&amp;#x27;ve thought about building a datapath on an FPGA that uses partial reconfiguration to synthesize new hardware blocks based on the math being doing at a particular instant, and it sounds like DARPA wants to do that on steroids. Server CPUs coupled with FPGAs are already being used for a lot of interesting things and I think it makes a lot of sense to integrate together even tighter. I&amp;#x27;m also really happy to hear that they&amp;#x27;re funding new EDA software that is actually smart. The best we have right now is some whitelist based rule checking for schematics and layout. I want full simulation, a perfect, proven parts library with symbols, footprints, 3D models, non-ideal SPICE models, and a thermal model for every part in existence, smart rule checking that looks not only for things like unconnected nets, but logic level mismatches and clock edges that are too fast.&lt;p&gt;Little pieces of this exist already, but in my opinion, software for creating hardware is way behind software for creating software.</text></comment>