by Peter Clarke
ORSoC AB, a Swedish design house that took over responsibility for maintaining the OpenCores website, www.opencores.org, in 2007 has announced that work has begun on OpenRISC 2000 (OR2K), an upgrade to the OpenRISC 1000 32-bit processor.

The OpenRISC 1000 first surfaced as a freely downloadable 32-bit processor design in 2000 (see Free 32-bit processor core hits the internet). It occupied about 35,000 gates or 70 percent of the smallest Xilinx Virtex FPGA available at that time, on which it could be clocked at about 100-MHz.

Since then both the OpenRISC 1000 and the open-source movement for hardware circuits have developed substantially, although at a much slower pace than open-source software movement.

Full Story