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Comment by ingenieroariel | Hacker News Reader

Sounds really good. Is it only free as in free beer or editable too?

The interesting applications for RISC-V are Vector Extensions and other application specific mods.

"DesignStart Eval enables completely free access to fixed-configuration Cortex-M0 and Cortex-M3 and full subsystem RTL for evaluation, prototype, teaching, and research. Available to all*, the packages can be downloaded instantly, requiring only a simple click-through agreement. "

and if you want to make a product,

"DesignStart Pro enables access to the full Cortex-M0, Cortex-M3, and subsystem RTL. Available to companies for commercial use with a no-risk, $0 license fee and success-based royalty model. Access to the IP can be requested online, requiring the signing of a simplified license agreement."

so free as in... kinda freeish free trial.

What's in that license agreement.. blood?

It is for Xilinx FPGAs only so at least it is not open-source friendly.

Came to the comments for the same question. The difference between beer and speech is important here, as the impact of a free-as-in-speech open-source design would be substantial.

Either way, thanks, ARM!

Beer. Pretty sure they will be precompiled RTL blobs.

Not even. You have to pay a royalty to ship one of these M0 designs, still. It's just designed to be more appealing to research.

The blog post said royalty free though... I agree its not exactly super clear.

> Pretty sure they will be precompiled RTL blobs.

They are. Encrypted, too.

Ugh. That's all I needed to know. (Thanks.)

There goes a very large pile of potential security research out the window.

That all being said, my sources tell me that tools exist which can decrypt the .vp files. It's still not going to be particularly readable, but at least it's available for analysis.

Hmm. Well, I get the impression the tools you mention are probably less hens-teeth than the ARM bitstream files ever were, so this development is pretty cool then.

You can add custom memory-mapped hardware though

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