Andrew "bunnie" Huang Opens Crowdfunding for the Radically Open Dabao Baochip-1x Dev Board
Board promises RTL and Verilog sources all the way through to a chip you can peel back with an infrared lamp and an inspection camera.
Noted maker Andrew "bunnie" Huang has officially opened crowdfunding for the Dabao Evaluation Board, a development board designed as a test-bed platform for the Baochip-1x — a system-on-chip (SoC) with a "mostly open RTL" design.
"Baochip-1x raises the bar on inspectable hardware, bringing you a system-on-chip (SoC) that you can check from the silicon all the way to the software," Huang says of the microcontroller at the heart of the Dabao. "Not only is the entire bootloader open-source and NDA [Non-Disclosure Agreement]-free, most of the design source for the compute logic is open and NDA-free. To top it off, the chip comes in a package specifically designed to facilitate Infra-Red, In-situ (IRIS) inspection — a non-destructive way to look at the silicon and confirm you've got the right chip based on the pattern of transistors printed on the silicon itself."
Huang isn't just waxing lyrical about the Baochip-1x for no reason: he's designed a compact development board that serves as a test-bed platform for the chip, which he unveiled back in January — then as the lower-cased "dabao." The breadboard-friendly PCB hosts the Baochip-1x and brings out its pins to castellated headers, giving the user an open-hardware Vexriscv RISC-V CPU core running at up to 350MHz, 2MB of static RAM (SRAM) plus an additional 256kB for input/output, 4MB of non-volatile resistive RAM (RRAM), and a quad-core input/output accelerator based on the also-open PicoRV32 core and running at up to 700MHz.
The Dabao is less about what the chip can do, though, and more about what it represents: one of the most open commercially-available microcontrollers around. Much of the chip's design is open to the register-transfer level (RTL), and it's packaged with the back side of the silicon facing the user — meaning that it's possible to peer at the chip's inner workings using infrared in-situ inspection (IRIS), a technique developed by Huang that uses a bright infrared light and a modified inspection camera to see through the chip's shiny upper layers to the components below.
The Dabao is now crowdfunding on Crowd Supply, priced at $9.50 per board plus shipping; those interested in a bulk buy can pick up a reel of 100 boards for $899 with free US shipping. All hardware is expected to begin shipping at the end of June, while those who can't wait that long can see the chip's source code on GitHub under the weakly reciprocal version of the CERN Open Hardware License 2; the Dabao board design files are available in a separate repository under the same license.