IBM has made good on its commitment, through the OpenPOWER Foundation, to release an Open Memory Interface (OMI) under a permissive licence, with the first reference designs for its Fire OMI host and ICE two-port DDR4 OMI device hitting GitHub this month.
The OpenPOWER Foundation made the surprising announcement that it was shifting the POWER instruction set architecture (ISA) to an an open model back in August, partnering with the Linux Foundation to release POWER under a permissive licence. At the time, the Foundation also pledged to release reference designs for OpenCAPI and the Open Memory Interface – which are now available for the first time.
IBM’s releases, announced by DARPA’s Andreas Olofsson, take two forms. The first is ICE, a reference design for an Open Memory Interface device offering two DDR4 memory ports. The second is Fire, an example host designed for testing an OMI device – including, naturally, ICE.
In both cases, the files have been made available through the OpenCAPI Consortium under the permissive Apache Licence 2.0, including Verilog and VHDL sources. Both are available to download now from the ICE and Fire GitHub repositories, while FOSSi Foundation director Olof Kindgren has suggested they are suitable for FuseSoC packaging.
Gareth Halfacree is a technology journalist and technical author best known for his work on the Raspberry Pi User Guide and an upcoming book covering the BBC’s micro:bit project. A keen open source advocate and RISC-V fan, Gareth is responsible for curating our fortnightly community round-up posts.