Open-source microprocessor

Benini offers an example from the research currently underway in his lab: “Using the PULPino processor, we are developing a smartwatch equipped with electronics and a micro camera. It can analyse visual information and use it to determine the user’s whereabouts. The idea is that such a smartwatch could one day control something like home electronics.” It is quite a challenge to accommodate all this in the smallest of spaces on a microprocessor with a tiny power draw of only a few milliwatts, particularly since the computing capacity for the image analysis must be sufficiently large.

Joint development

PULPino is also being used in other research projects that Benini is working on with Swiss and European research institutions, including Cambridge University. The fact that the processor is now open source in these projects gives the ETH professor great hope: “Until now, such research projects came about mainly as a result of personal contacts, and the partners had to negotiate a separate license agreement for each project. PULPino is now more easily available. We hope that there will be more collaborations in the future and that these will also be easier.”

The scientists want to work with other project partners to jointly develop academically interesting extensions to PULPino; these would also be open source, thus allowing the number of the hardware’s functional components to steadily grow.

Interesting for the industry

But PULPino should also be of

benefit to the SME environment typical in Switzerland and Europe. “The production of microchips has become cheap in recent years because semiconductor manufacturers have built up large production capacities that they must use,” explains Benini. More expensive is the design process: “It would be far too expensive in terms of engineering effort to design a complex chip from scratch, especially for SMEs. Instead, developers usually purchase pre-designed functional components that they  integrate in the chip design. The licensing fees for such components are often a substantial portion of the overall production costs.”

Development costs are reduced considerably with the open-source royalty-free design, which benefits SMEs as well as ETH, says Benini: “It could result in new research and development partnerships with industry to jointly develop novel chip components on the basis of PULPino.” PULPino’s developers are therefore planning to make their microprocessor more widely known to the open-source hardware community this year.