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Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

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Re: Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

#71

Post by jcgrillo »

bunnie wrote: post #65
jcgrillo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm basically ignorant of this entire space--I have mostly worked on SaaS products--so please forgive the question if it's too naive but as (the first?) someone who has just experienced this new and rare way of bringing a design to life are there any obvious process/tooling/whatever improvements you noticed that might make it less risky (and therefore less rare)? Reading your blog posts, the crowd supply materials, X…

There's actually a whole space of shared-mask tapeouts. You might have heard of TinyTapeout [1]/LibreLane [2] and the general concept of "MPW" masks - multi-project wafer masks. These effectively share cost among hundreds of developers, bringing the cost of a tape-out down. If you're lucky enough to have an affiliation with certain institutions, there are programs that basically give academics the experience I had fo…

Thank you for the references this is absolutely fascinating stuff.

Re: Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

#72

Post by utopiah »

anilakar wrote: post #33
genxy wrote: post #25

To anyone from crowdsupply listening, please turn down your VPN check. I am not stripping my privacy protection to use your site. *edit, Crowdsupply does a full block on multiple VPN providers. There is no way to access their site without turning off your VPN.

You do realize that violating export regulations is a much bigger risk than losing a few individuals relying on snake oil security?

CrowdSupply checks on purchase and will withhold goods until you, individual or other entity, do confirm you respect export regulation.

I'm not saying it's totally unrelated, only that there do have a dedicated non technical but legal check.

Re: Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

#73

Post by [deleted] »

genxy wrote: post #36
anilakar wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that violating export regulations is a much bigger risk than losing a few individuals relying on snake oil security?

Digikey and Mouser do not do this. > few individuals relying on snake oil security Please don't.

[deleted]

Re: Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

#74

Post by stavros »

bunnie wrote: post #64
stavros wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, true, it's all downside for them for this, basically. Still, there must be some price for which companies will let other companies use die space, but maybe that price is higher than just doing the thing yourself...

In the space of possibilities this can be abstractly thought of as a Caravell [1] harness gone wild. But if you had to price access to the project in a commercial sense, then, the pricing is going to be quite high. Because it's not just the cost of the masks - there's a whole lot of talent and skill in the team that does the "backend" processing. That is, once the RTL is done, it goes through multiple passes of place…

That's very informative, thank you.

Re: Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

#75

Post by vintagedave »

duffmancd wrote: post #34
vintagedave wrote: post #26

This is wonderful! Also what a fantastic partnership that allowed adding a new CPU to that die. Kudos to them. I had a lot of trouble finding out which open source license applies. Wikipedia’s RISC-V page doesn’t seem to say; its citation for being released under open source doesn’t seem to say which one either.[0] Could be wrong. Exhausted after working all day. But it’s not front and center… On the RISC-V site I th…

RISC-V is a family of instruction sets (which have various chips implementing them). Think "X86-64". It looks like the baochip-1x is using the VexRiscv CPU. The HDL is available here under MIT: https://github.com/SpinalHDL/VexRiscv

Thanks - so that one is MIT licensed. Is that the license for all RISC-V, ie ISA plus actual silicon designs?

Re: Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

#76

Post by bunnie »

vintagedave wrote: post #75
duffmancd wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RISC-V is a family of instruction sets (which have various chips implementing them). Think "X86-64". It looks like the baochip-1x is using the VexRiscv CPU. The HDL is available here under MIT: https://github.com/SpinalHDL/VexRiscv

Thanks - so that one is MIT licensed. Is that the license for all RISC-V, ie ISA plus actual silicon designs?

To clarify - RISC-V is an architecture, and that is an open specification. However, as an architecture it only specifies things like, what the instructions are and their encodings. It doesn't actually give you a CPU that does anything, just an abstraction of how to describe a CPU to a common standard.

Anyone is permitted to implement a RISC-V CPU, which would then involve coding something up in an RTL. The resulting RTL artifact may be open or closed source depending upon the developer's preference. In the case of the Vexriscv, that particular one implementation is MIT licensed. There are other implementations that also have MIT licenses, but because it is up to the core's implementer to pick a license, not all RISC-V cores are open source.

In fact, some of the most commercially successful RISC-V cores are closed source licensed.

Re: Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

#77

Post by alexisread »

bunnie wrote: post #42
alexisread wrote: post #18

Great work on the chip, I’m really onboard with the trusted computing aim! Is there a way to bootstrap binary code into the reram? I’m thinking being able to ‘hand-type’ in a few hundred byte kernel rather than use a flashing tool

The chip comes from the factory with a boot0/boot1 chain that is fully reproducible and buildable from source. Developers can replace boot1 with their own version, where you could add the feature you're thinking about.

Thanks! One last question is whether it can boot from external EEPROM? This is mainly with reference to Ken Thompson’s Reflections on Trusting Trust paper (https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2324/R209/Reflections-Trus...).

What would be good is to be able to program the eeprom with hardware, boot the bao with the eeprom and then bootstrap the rest of the OS.

Lastly I was thinking on the inclusion of 4 bidirectional (transputer) links so to speak. I’m guessing you’ve thought about clusters of these chips?

Thanks

Re: Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

#78

Post by cmrdporcupine »

K0balt wrote: post #29
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the Parallax Propeller 1/2 as well. It's a good model for MCU stuff. There were people pushing Chip Gracey (Parallax) to use RISC-V instead of his custom ISA when he designed the P2 a few years ago, but he chose to do his own thing. Which has made compiler development difficult.

This seems more on the RPI side rather than propeller, propeller was never a really good choice for production integration. This looks like it could hold its own in many contexts.

If I understand the architecture it's both -- a main MPU style core and then a bunch of PicoRiscV cores doing MCU tasks. The smart thing about using RISC-V here being having a unified ISA so you can compile programs that run on both or move between both, etc.

I'm assuming he probably has some sort of roundrobin shared memory access similar to what Chip did with "HUB Ram" on the P2.

Re: Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

#79

Post by blep-arsh »

anilakar wrote: post #33
genxy wrote: post #25

To anyone from crowdsupply listening, please turn down your VPN check. I am not stripping my privacy protection to use your site. *edit, Crowdsupply does a full block on multiple VPN providers. There is no way to access their site without turning off your VPN.

You do realize that violating export regulations is a much bigger risk than losing a few individuals relying on snake oil security?

CrowdSupply isn't geoblocking visitors as far as I know.

Re: Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

#80

Post by userbinator »

quailfarmer wrote: post #70
userbinator wrote: post #61

A bit sad to see another famous hacker turning to the "dark side" --- as "security chips" are a treacherous slippery slope, no matter who controls them. Just because it's "open source" doesn't mean it's a good thing. Edit: give Stallman's "Right to Read" another read.

On the other hand, Pandora’s box has been opened, and the double-edged sword of cryptography has been unleashed on the world. Having open source security/trust systems is valuable.

Nuclear weapons also opened a Pandora's box, but that doesn't mean open source ones would be better either.
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