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A free and open source software, hardware and firmware PC with a eFPGA

vitalmixofntrnt Tuesday, April 01, 2025

Basically, a QuickLogic Qomu Dev Board plugged into a hub with six USB Type A ports:

        * A USB Type A keyboard

        * A USB Type A mouse

        * A DisplayPort over USB Type C Monitor connected with a USB Type C to USB Type A adapter

        * A MicroSD to USB Type C Adapter connected to a USB Type C to USB Type A adapter

        * A free and open source wifi or ethernet or lora adapter.
A free and open source SPI Firmware for the Arm Cortex M4F can be developed. The eFPGA's tooling is officially supported with a free and open source Verilog to Bistream toolchain, as opposed to the legal gray area that is FPGA vendors tolerating reverse engineered toolchains, a stance that they might change in the future.

I don't know if the Qomu's EOS S3 chip has the proprietary flexible fusion engine, I'll edit this post once QuickLogic tells me whether it does or doesn't, but the documentation says that if it does have it, the Flexible Fusion Engine is powered off by default, so as long as I don't turn it on, it's free and open source hardware.

I'll make a gplv3 or later OS for it where the Arm core powers up the eFPGA and reconfigures it when necessary for performance. The eFPGA would run a soft core cpu whose instruction set is my programming language source code. My OS will run entirely in Ring 0 and I'll make it programmable with my programming language via voice commands since that chip has a microphone inside. My OS will be for recreational programming. I'll call it eFPGAos-Libre.

Now I know that the Arm Cortex M4F and QuickLogic eFPGA's Architecture are both closed source, so one can't put QuickLogic's eFPGA architecture or derivatives of it or the Arm Cortex M4F or derivatives of it into a chip of theirs without either's permission, but the tooling for both is entirely free and open source.

It comes with 512KB of Sram in the chip, enough for me.

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