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The ASIC and FPGA designs available from this website are available for anyone to download and use. They are being provided under MIT's open source license, which gives you the right to use the designs for both commercial and academic purposes and even to make changes, fixes and enhancements to the designs with the only obligation that you maintain the license text in the source code. (see MIT License Text)
Power and cost constraints dictate a need for specialized circuits in many markets, for example the burgeoning market of handheld devices and sensors. Yet the ever increasing chip design costs and time-to-market of ASICs create a major hurdle in the exploitation of this opportunity. We think that parameterized reusable components are the most immediate solution to this problem.
Designed with Bluespec SystemVerilog, these designs are highly modular, re-usable designs, with many of them highly parameterized, even along micro-architectural dimensions – and they are all synthesizable into Verilog RTL using Bluespec's synthesis toolset (Bluespec's university program provides licenses for free to accredited institutions). At MIT, we believe that hardware semantics that promote modular composition and parameterization will promote more collaboration and enable far more flexible designs that are easier to reuse.
We are hoping that this initiative will promote more open sharing of design and model components – and, herald a new era of reuse involving much larger building blocks. Whether you are planning on using these designs for commercial, research or academic purposes, please enjoy!
While we're not specifically staffed to actively support these designs, we'd love to hear feedback of any kind.
Projects
H.264: HD quality H.264 baseline profile decoder. Supports 1080p at 60 frames per second. At 100 MHz in 180nm technology, it requires approximately 4 square millimeters. Design has been specifically ported for Xilinx FPGA. Please read the README.TXT and note known issues about the software reference model provided for testing. For questions, send email to:
.OFDM: OFDM transceiver (transmitter and receiver), highly parameterized to cover 802.11a (WiFi), 802.16 (WiMax) and others in the future. Support for 802.15 (WUSB) is currently being worked on. For questions, send email to:
.802.11a: 802.11a WiFi transmitter. For questions, send email to:
.Acknowledgements
The designs provided here are the product of research by the students and faculty of MIT and, in many cases, the product of joint research with world-class companies such as Nokia. Special acknowledgements go to the designers of each project. The individual author names for each project are highlighted in each header file.