Wishbone Streaming
Add Streaming capabilities to Wishbone
On System-on-Chips (SoC) the commercial grade bus infrastructure is covered by patents and at best available "royalty-free" (but with no ability to change). A serious alternative with significant adoption is the Wishbone SoC Bus, which is an Open Standard but does not yet have a "streaming" capability. That capability is needed for high-throughput data paths and interfaces. This project will provide an enhancement to the current Wishbone SoC Bus specification, provide Reference Implementations and Bus Function Models (BFM) to easily allows unit tests for all Wishbone BFM users. For demonstration purposes the project will implement an example peripheral to prove the overall concept.
- The project's own website: https://libre-riscv.org/nlnet_2019_wishbone_streaming
Why does this actually matter to end users?
When you go to a store to buy a laptop or mobile phone, you may see different brands on the outside but choice in terms of what is inside the box (in particular the most expensive component, the processor technology) is pretty much limited to the same core technologies and large vendors that have been in the market for decades. This has a much bigger effect on the users than just the hefty price tag of the hardware, because the technologies at that level impact all other technologies and insecurity at that level break security across the board.
In the field of software, open source has already become the default option in the market for any new setup. In hardware, the situation is different. Users - even very big users such as governments - have very little control over the actual hardware security of the technology they critically depend on every day. Security experts continue to uncover major security issues, and users are rightly concerned about the security of their private data as well as the continuity of their operations. But in a locked-down market there is little anyone can do, because the lack of alternatives. European companies are locked out of the possibility to contribute solutions and start new businesses that can change the status quo.
This ambitious project wants to deliver the first completely open computer processor in history - one you don' t have to merely trust, because you can verify and modify everything about it. All of the technology included, from top to bottom, will become available for inspection, and can be tuned by anyone technically capable enough. This will significantly contribute to the creation a new generation of computer technologies, as well as more energy efficient and cheaper devices. NGI Zero funds several important building blocks of this project, like this effort to improve an existing open source hardware component that will let parts of the open processor share data with each other. Ultimately these building blocks will come together in a transparent computer processor that can make our computing devices more trustworthy.
This project was funded through the NGI0 PET Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825310.
