M-Labs

M-Labs (formerly known as the Milkymist project) is a company and community who develop, manufacture and sell advanced open hardware devices and solutions. It is best known for the Milkymist system-on-chip (SoC) which is among the first commercialized system-on-chip designs with free HDL source code. M-Labs (formerly known as the Milkymist project) is a company and community who develop, manufacture and sell advanced open hardware devices and solutions. It is best known for the Milkymist system-on-chip (SoC) which is among the first commercialized system-on-chip designs with free HDL source code. M-Labs technologies have been reused in diverse applications. For example, NASA's Communication Navigation and Networking Reconfigurable Testbed (CoNNeCT) experiment uses the memory controller that was originally developed for the Milkymist One and published under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The project was presented at several open source and hacker conferences such as the Chaos Communication Congress, FOSDEM, Libre Software Meeting, and Libre Graphics Meeting 2011. It was also featured on the Make magazine blog and the Milkymist One board was included in their 'ultimate open source hardware gift guide 2010'. The Milkymist system-on-chip uses the LatticeMico32 (LM32) core as a general purpose processor. It is a RISC 32-bit big endian CPU with a memory management unit (MMU) developed later by M-Labs contributors. It is supported by the GCC compiler and can run RTEMS and μClinux. There is also an experimental back-end for LLVM targeting this microprocessor. The LM32 microprocessor is assisted by a texture mapping unit and a programmable floating point VLIW coprocessor which are used by the Flickernoise video synthesis software. It is also surrounded by various peripheral cores to support every I/O device of the Milkymist One. The system-on-chip interconnect uses three bridged buses and mixes the Wishbone protocol with two custom protocols used for configuration registers and high performance DMA with the SDRAM. The architecture of the Milkymist system-on-chip is largely documented in the project founder's Master thesis report. Most components of the system-on-chip, except the LatticeMico32 core, were custom developed and placed under the GNU GPL license. The QEMU emulator can be used to run and debug Milkymist SoC binaries on another computer. The Milkymist One video synthesizer and reconfigurable computer is the main product released by the project. It was manufactured by Qi Hardware, a start-up founded by former Openmoko employees. It was first sold at the Chaos Communication Congress in 2010, as an 'early developer kit' for interested hackers, open source activists and pioneers who could tolerate the remaining software and FPGA design shortcomings. A more refined version, including case and accessories, was later offered for sale. The technical specifications of the Milkymist One are as follows: