About me

I'm a digital design engineer currently living and working in Stockholm, Sweden Cambridge, England San Diego, California Sydney, Australia.

I studied at the University of Queensland (BEng) and KTH, Stockholm (MSc).

Things I do

Below are a few things I'm involved in.

FOSSi Foundation

I've been involved with getting the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation off the ground in recent years. It's a UK-based C.I.C aiming to foster a mature open source semiconductor design ecosystem, focused mainly on digital design IP and tools.

I'm currently involved as a director of the Foundation and help arrange our yearly conference held in Europe, ORconf. I'm also involved in the licensing committee, read about our activities here.

OpenRISC

IRC channel logs.

I worked on the OpenRISC project where I developed CPU implementations and low-level software.

I host most of my current work at http://github.com/juliusbaxter (although, that's all pretty out of date, see the OpenRISC organisation on github for the most up to date stuff).

I also host logs for the #openrisc channel on irc.freenode.net.

I wrote my master's thesis on the project, you can download a PDF copy here.

Open Source Hardware Licensing

I'm having a go at putting together a weak copyleft license for open source RTL designs.

A fork of the MPL2, the Open Hardware Description License (OHDL) aims to be more applicable to RTL code than software licenses, and make that code more likely to be used by industry. Find out more about it here.

FOSSi have a good page on open source digital design licensing which I contributed to.

Projects of note

The Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation - FOSSi - the vanguard of the open source digital design movement

LibreCores - OpenCores Done Right™

Veripool.org - great open source Verilog and SystemC tools by the awesome Wilson Snyder

FuseSoC - the next-generation IP and SoC development environment

lowRISC - open source SoC

M-Labs - they actually make things

RISC-V - a worthy contemporary open source ISA

Cocotb - RTL testbenches in Python

PULP - one of the better RISC-V based multicore SoCs out there

SymbiFlow - open source FPGA tools

efabless - properly open source chips.

Presentations

I've given a few presentations on the above topics and on open source hardware development in general. Here's a list.

Upcoming

ORConf 2020, ??? - Organiser

Past

ORConf 2019, Bordeaux, France - Organiser

Latch-Up 2019, Portland, Oregon - Organiser, presenter

ORConf 2018, Gdansk, Poland - Organiser

ORConf 2017, Hebden Bridge, UK - Organiser

ORConf 2016, Bologna, Italy - Organiser

OSHUG, London - The Open Source Silicon Design Ecosystem, video

ORConf 2015, Geneva, Switzerland - Organiser

ORConf 2014, Munich, Germany - Organiser

EHSM #2, Hamburg, Germany - "The mor1kx OpenRISC processor" - video - EETimes article

Chip Hack May 2014, Cambridge, England - Tutorials on basic FPGA use and the OpenRISC Platform

ORConf 2013, Cambridge, England - Organiser, workshop and "mor1kx progress report"

OHS2013, Boston, USA - "Open Chip Development: What there is to gain, and is it possible?"

Chip Hack April 2013, London, England - Tutorials on basic FPGA use and the OpenRISC Platform

ORConf 2012 - Stockholm, Sweden - Organiser, and "The new mor1kx CPU core"

OSHUG 17, London, England - "Practical System-on-Chip (Program your own open source FPGA SoC)"

FSCONS 2012, Gothenburg, Sweden - "1576800000000000 cycles later (OpenRISC Project update)"

FOSDEM 2012, Brussels, Belgium - "True open hardware: Opencores and OpenRISC"

FSCONS 2011, Gothenburg, Sweden - "About The OpenRISC Project"

FSCONS 2011, Gothenburg, Sweden - "Workshop: The OpenRISC Project"

linux.conf.au 2011, Brisbane, Australia - "The OpenRISC Platform"

Contact

Sites

Email

juliusbaxter@gmail.com

IRC

Find me in #openrisc on irc.freenode.net