OpenPiton Release 13 Brings the Free and Open OpenPiton+Ariane Platform to Amazon's EC2 F1 FPGAs

The OpenPiton project has announced that it's now possible to spin up an OpenPiton+Ariane open silicon instance in the cloud, courtesy of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) field-programmable gate array (FPGA) infrastructure.

Free and open source silicon projects promise much. For manufacturers, the freedom to modify a core's design as much or as little as necessary and no costly licensing fees; for end-users, the ability to see exactly how things work and even have a try at building something yourself. In both cases, though, there's a bottleneck to be found: to actually play with free and open source silicon, you either need to produce a physical part or load a "soft" core onto an FPGA — and the latter doesn't always come cheap, especially if you're looking to play with more powerful and complicated cores.

With OpenPiton Release 13, project maintainer Jonathan Balkind has announced, a lack of access to hardware no longer needs to be an issue. "The headline feature of this release is support for running OpenPiton+Ariane in the cloud via Amazon EC2 F1," he explains, referring to the efforts of OpenPiton and the PULP Platform to release an open-source design combining the former's SPARC-based OpenPiton and the latter's RISC-V-based Ariane cores.

"We now provide a step-by-step guide in the README of OpenPiton on GitHub which explains how to emulate OpenPiton+Ariane on Amazon EC2 F1 cloud FPGAs. You can make use of our existing release image to test software and firmware, or synthesise your own OpenPiton-based hardware design by following our instructions."

The OpenPiton GitHub repository now includes step-by-step instructions on firing up an OpenPiton+Ariane core on EC2 F1 — a process which requires no additional hardware beyond the system you're using to read this article.