Borg: Conformance + Scale-Out

Borg is a fully open-source GPU, from the Chisel hardware description, through synthesis and place-and-route, to a real Mesa Vulkan driver. It closes a transparency gap that even open CPU projects rarely address for graphics hardware, where microarchitecture and toolchains are normally locked behind NDAs. In its first phase, Borg grew from a single floating-point unit into a complete, autonomous tile-based-rendering pipeline with texture mapping, multi-lane SIMT fragment shading, and a native Vulkan driver that runs the unmodified Khronos vkcube demo on a $100 FPGA board — and it reached real silicon with a taped-out ASIC (IHP 130nm), to our knowledge the first open-source GPU design to do so. Borg II continues this work towards genuine, reproducible openness: growing the driver's Vulkan conformance test coverage well beyond its current early results, extending the shading hardware with additional parallel shader units, and re-taping-out the design periodically so the whole open EDA flow stays validated against real silicon. The outcome is a complete graphics stack — hardware, toolchain, and driver — that researchers, educators, and hobbyists can inspect, modify, and build on without a single NDA.