By whygee on Saturday 8 May 2010, 06:50 - Updates and news

Worse : the f-cpu.seul.org miror is down since january !

Is the project dead ?

No :-)

In fact a lot of things are being prepared, mostly in the commercial, infrastructure and very-low-level hardware (like : where are those 0402 capacitors ?) fronts. It's really exciting but it takes a lot of time and money ! Fortunately I'm not completely alone.

A string of good news will probably come in 2011, they will help the bootstrap of the whole YASEP project with different kinds of support, with broad public exposure. It will be possible to have a YASEP implementation in hand, I work both on the hardware and software sides :-) BTW, a recent Wikipedia article has appeared with a short summary of the YASEP's architecture.

Another critical part of the project (the VHDL source code and its infrastructure) is in active development : GHDL is now the officially supported simulator. I have interviewed the main developer (Tristan Gingold) for GNU/Linux Magazine France n°127. With Laura, we
started a series of articles about VHDL development under Linux and I am proposing increasingly advanced ... hacks :-) The first YASEP implementations will be designed with "design for test" in mind.

In parallel, another subproject is the design of a Libre, affordable, compact and Ethernet-enabled JTAG programming probe. More on this subject in the future, but it's critical for the rest of the whole project : my JTAG probes are either USB (and constrained to Actel parts, and don't work under Linux) or parallel-port (no new consumer-grade computer today has this port anymore).

Finally, after the seul.org debacle (due to main server being compromised because of its participation in the tor network), I have opened a new miror at TuxFamily.

So I'm still polishing the tools and gathering the parts. It's not a visible activity but it's probably the most important. What does an architecture mean if there is no infrastructure behind ? With no physical implementation that one can buy and hack oneself ?

It's amazing that the old TuxFamily mirror is still alive !

The Wikipedia article was taken down some time later...

GHDL has grown into an indispensable tool that does much more than it was intended to do !

Though no physical YASEP implementation ever saw the light of the day... yet.

The Ethernet-enabled probe turned into the #WizYasep ...