Open Source Hardware

Open source hardware could well be India’s best bet to get started with a hardware industry, without spending years designing microchips from scratch, writes Varun Aggarwal

If you look at the history of science and technology, it was always open source—there was no IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) on using each other’s technology—right from invention of fire to the wheel to the radio. Had Aryabhatta patented or copyrighted ‘zero’, we would not have had modern mathematics, or perhaps even modern science. It was only recently that the whole concept of patents was brought in. Jaijit Bhattacharya, Country Director, Government Strategy, Asia South and India, Sun Microsystems, explained, “The idea was that if a lone inventor was inventing something, the large corporation should not be able to take over that invention and therefore there should be some benefit to the lone inventor and that’s how the society will benefit—they will incentivize the lone inventor, in order to protect him. In reality what is happening is that if you come out with an invention, it cannot be possible without all the other inventions in the world and all of the other inventions would be owned by some large corporation. So, if you commercialize your product using those existing (patented) inventions, the corporations [that own the concerned patents] would sue you. Therefore, the corporate can offer all its patents to the inventor in lieu of his new invention. However, with this the inventor is left nowhere because he does not have the financial power or the marketing power. Whereas in the bargain, the large corporate gets to use the invention for its own benefits.”

The fundamental premise based on which various open source projects are built is to foster innovation through collaboration. Open Source Hardware also rides the same tide—various practitioners collaborate and contribute to developing newer technologies. Open source hardware is based on publishing all necessary data about the hardware. The design specification, HDL files, simulation test benches, synthesis results, utilization instructions and interfaces to other systems should be documented. The openness of necessary design documentation and its disclosure to the public should be governed by the terms of GPL like licenses according to which all information is disclosed for free. The EDA tools used to develop open hardware should also be open. Openness of resources is a must to allow the community to reuse, develop and improve open designs.

India has an almost non-existent hardware industry today, while China’s total hardware industry is at a whopping $1.3 trillion (with about $800 billion of exports), which is about half of its GDP. China has come out with a dragon chip based on the MIPS architecture and released a sub Rs 10,000 ($200) laptop running on this chip which could completely change their society.

Bhattacharya explained, “From a strategic perspective, China is investing massively into software. The advantage that India has today could potentially be over in a few years time, in terms of software. China is a country that has a complete control over the hardware and they will get control over software and their labor would be far cheaper. Therefore, there is a threat that other economies would take over in the software. Because we do not have ground level hardware, we will find it difficult to catch up. So,

we have 20 years before all of this happens—training the human resources, design smaller ASICs, then larger microprocessors, then you need the volumes to set up a fab. By the time you do all of this, what you will come out with would already be outdated.”

“Most fabs globally are pretty close to making a loss or are already in the red. There were two serious players that were ready to set up fabs in India; both of them did not work out due to the downturn that happened. For now the semiconductor policy of India has not led to the creation of any fabs in India. That is primarily because we need to have sufficient volumes to make this $2 billion investment on a fresh fab. There are enough fabs, enough capacity elsewhere in the world. Unless you have got something pushing you in a big way, you will not set up another fab and you need to set up a fab where there are enough people. Now the joke in Taiwan is that, if you throw a stone, it will hit a hardware designer—we cannot say that about India,” Bhattacharya added.

We have almost no human resources to support the hardware industry—of course we have institutes like IIT Kharagpur, IIT Delhi etc, but that is not enough to support such a large industry. For e.g., if we look at software, there is a software training institute in every nook and corner and hardware is a far bigger industry than software—not in terms of margins and profits but in terms of how widespread it is. The software industry in India is strictly limited to computers—very limited work is happening in embedded systems. To support the software industry, we have such a large widespread software training culture in this country. We do not have something similar for the hardware industry. India’s entire economy is about $1 trillion whereas just one industry in China is $1.3 trillion. Even if we get 10% of it, it’s enough for us.

Subram Natarajan, Senior Consultant, Systems And Technology Group, IBM India/SA, said, “Open Source Hardware presents a credible opportunity to tap into some of the brightest talents around the world and to leverage on some of the experiences that the participating vendor organizations have gone through—hence there is potential to develop the best of solutions and practices here.”

Bhattacharya said, “Fortunately Sun Microsystems has an open source microprocessor called OpenSparc. From the government perspective, this is an excellent opportunity to get a head start and cut down the 20 year investment period by immediately adopting a microprocessor and jumpstarting the process. So the human resource development can happen in parallel to the commercialization, in parallel to the processors being shipped out, in parallel to the ASICs being created. All of this can be done in a much shorter timeframe.”

Natarajan opined, “IBM established the Power.org and Blade.org organizations to accelerate the ecosystem around POWER processors and Blade systems. Through an open hardware approach, not only the users of the technology but also the vendors and educational institutions participate in coming up with solutions that addresses the infrastructure related challenges that companies face today. This is in addition to the comprehensive support for Linux that IBM provides across its portfolio.”

IBM’s extensive software, hardware, and services portfolio, as well as over 600 developers working with the community on over 100 open source projects serve clients across the globe. IBM has made a strategic commitment to these concepts and has aligned its hardware, software, services and consulting businesses to support the building of open infrastructure enabling our customers to make the journey toward a ‘smarter planet’.

Similarly, the aim of the OpenRISC project is to create a free, open source computing platform available under the GNU (L)GPL license. The platform must be versatile to fit various target applications. The platform is based on three key ingredients, which are a free, open source 32/64-bit RISC/DSP architecture; a set of free, open source implementations of the architecture and a complete set of free, open source software development tools, operating systems and software applications/libraries.

Business models

There are risks involved in releasing a company’s design as open source. Firstly, competitors may improve their own designs by looking at this code. Secondly, competitors who do not yet have designs ready for the market may shorten their design cycle and save costs, and finally, new competitors who may not have had the resources to compete could now enter the market. As interfaces and designs become commoditized, market efficiency will increase and all of these costs will approach zero. Interestingly, the use of a GNU style open source license, which requires the publication of derivative works, means that none of these events can occur without a corresponding benefit to the company that open sources its hardware. This is so because the value of the design, once open sourced, increases as the number of co-developers increases, and no competitor may benefit significantly from the design without becoming a co-developer himself. Moreover, additional benefits will accrue for free when code is adopted by companies that can use the code but are not competitors with the open sourcing company. Balancing the costs of an open source strategy versus the benefits from acquiring competing and non-competing co-developers, it is clear that there must be many business situations in which an open source hardware strategy makes sense.

Another possible business model that could benefit from open source is third party development. A design could be built from the ground up as open source by a design firm working under contract from one or more chip manufacturers. Third-party chip makers who have an interest in the product but were not privy to the original contract would have incentives to contribute additional funds in order to speed development or influence the specifications of the product. In addition, companies that do not wish to fund the design, but who nevertheless have an interest in the product under development, would have incentives to donate engineering resources to the project. This style of design would encourage the development of generic and customizable cores that could serve multiple purposes for many different users. Furthermore, the design firm would be in the best position to leverage code reuse methodologies in order to reduce its engineering costs. Lastly, although the source code to a completed design would be freely available, the design firm could generate significant revenue from support contracts. The suppliers of electronic design automation tools may be particularly well positioned to take advantage of this opportunity, since an open source hardware design could become a powerful revenue driver for their core software business.

Some Open Source hardware implementations Bhattacharya said, “Because India had a lot of pilots in the e-governance, we are ahead in terms of e-governance compared to China, Africa, Latin America—their per capita GDP is far higher than ours but yet we are far ahead of them because we had these pilots. These led to capacity building and training. In e-governance we had nowhere else to learn from, so we are most advanced in terms of e-governance among the large countries. However, in hardware and microprocessors, we are far behind—we never had that industry. Here is an opportunity where we can go back and pick something, which is open source, and can be adopted quickly.”

In addition, there are other initiatives like the Simputer that the army is trying to use for battlefield communications. Simputer was the pioneer in open source hardware. In 2004, Simputers were extensively used by the government of Karnataka to automate the process of land records procurement. Prior to this large scale deployment, Simputers were also used in an ambitious project in Chhattisgarh for the purpose of e-education. In 2005 they were used in a variety of innovative and interesting applications, such as automobile engine diagnostics (Mahindra & Mahindra in Mumbai), tracking of iron-ore movement from mine pithead to shipping point (Dempo, Goa), Microcredit (Sanghamitra, Mysore), Electronic Money Transfer between UK and Ghana (XK8 Systems, UK), and others. In recent times, the Simputer has seen deployment by the police force to track traffic offenders and issue traffic tickets.

Then there’s XORP, an extensible open source routing platform, which is used worldwide by companies and educational institutions. Designed for extensibility from the start, XORP provides a fully featured platform that implements IPv4 and IPv6 routing protocols and a unified platform to configure them. It is the only open source platform to offer integrated multicast capability. XORP’s modular architecture allows the rapid introduction of new protocols, features and functionality, including support for custom hardware and software forwarding. Using this platform, you can buy a low cost router from any vendor (e.g. Vyatta, which specializes in open source routers) and get almost all the functionalities of a proprietary router costing about 10 times more.

Another Open source project of note is Asterisk, an open source telephony engine and tool kit. Offering flexibility unheard of in the world of proprietary communications, Asterisk empowers developers and integrators to create advanced communication solutions, for free.

Asterisk is released as open source under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and it is available for download free of charge.

Under the guidance of Samir K Brahmachari, Director General (DG) of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Secretary of Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), CSIR is taking an active interest in open source hardware. Though it is still early days to talk about this, if their initiatives go in the right direction, perhaps we would someday have an IT hardware industry like that of China, if not bigger, giving a boost to the Indian economy.

varun.aggarwal@expressindia.com