Peter Clarke reports in EE Times that momentum is slowly building for freely available open-source processors, the semiconductor market's equivalent of open-source software. Clarke writes . . .

“A handful of commercial efforts are experimenting with open-source CPU cores. Contract-manufacturing giant Flextronics, for example, is laying plans to tap into open-source hardware for its ASICs. And both Metaflow Technologies Inc. (La Jolla, Calif.) and IROC Technologies SA (Grenoble, France) are building products using the Leon-1, a Sparc-like open-source processor developed at the European Space Agency's Technology Center.”

“Meanwhile, free cores for Bluetooth and the USB 2.0 interface could become available later this year, open-source developers said.”

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