Admin, OpenCores

![OpenCores](https://cdn.opencores.org/pad/OC_logo_newsletter.png)


Dear community members,

Since our last news earlier in summer this year, we've been working heads-down
in a number of major overhauling efforts, which are now slowly converging.
 
**In a nutshell: it is all about the way we provide the community with tools to
productively and effectively collaborate! :)** The code hosting side of OpenCores
had always been rather central to the platform, and its community. Twenty years
ago (yes, two-zero) the site started with sharing via FTP, then CVS came, and
then it got replaced by SVN. Which is still a viable solution for some, but it
is undeniably phasing out.

When Oliscience acquired the portal to push it to the next level, it became
quite clear quite soon that the company had to commit to **two major actions in this area: (i)
provide support for more modern version control, (ii) extend the "mere"
collective file-sharing capabilities to something more "DevOps cycle" oriented.**

If you are as curious as we are about things in life, you will immediately
start asking yourself many questions: how, why, who, when... etc.

Well, the how and (with) who(m) struck us the most: it's a big challenge to steer
such large and diverse community to something greater. So **we needed to partner
up with ambitious forces. This is why we looked almost immediately at GitLab.**
It is not on us to praise the strength of that company, their results speak by
themselves, we believe! That is why we decided to share the burden with them.

What we have done so far was to migrate our bugtracker to a self-hosted
instance of GitLab, which runs via an API from our "good old" OpenCores web
interface. We took the opportunity to clean-up the bugs' database along the
way.  It was a lot of effort with years of stacked dusty posts here and there! 
{yes, we also tried to restore the OpenRISC Bugzilla database, but sadly
we did not manage, sorry guys} 

The goal is to complete the migration in the coming months, and allow users to
automatically migrate their SVN projects to GIT in GitLab. 

We will also offer the capability to auto-import projects from other code
hosting platforms, as yet again we strive to keep the consistency of the
OpenCores IP Cores portfolio.  We will keep for the time being a moderated
project creation request, as we want to differentiate from other providers, and
try to keep the quality of the projects we host, as high as we can.

Speaking of quality, it emerged from many of you giving constructive feedback to
us that project quality assessment matrices are crucial for many professionals
working with Open Source IP Cores.  This is another reason why we decided to
team up with the GitLab folks and **explore together what we like to call
"Continuous Verification" (CV), which is a method to automatically run
standardized benchmarks on gateware Cores**.

**Here is a link to the official news on the GitLab blog:**
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/12/03/welcoming-opencores-to-gitlab/

*David Planella, Director of Community Relations at GitLab mentions:
"We're thrilled to welcome the OpenCores community into GitLab, in what we think will be a mutually beneficial and productive relationship. We love Open Source, technology and community, and we're honored to be a part of OpenCores' advances in the gateware hosting and sharing capabilities of their portal with git. But if there is an area where the two communities align the most is in innovation, and we'll be looking forward to contributing OpenCores' pioneering goal of bringing Continuous Verification to digital designs on their portal."*

Now: a call to action... please go out there and give the new bug tracker a try!  And
continue looking at the site, the fora, and the news for more features in release
announcements!

Do you have feedback? Don't hesitate to get in touch with us!
https://opencores.org/contact

**We hope you'll enjoy and make good use of the new tools!  We've put a lot of
effort and (geeky) love to get them running!**

Best,

/:/ OC-team


Oliscience partners with GitLab to provide GIT support on OpenCores

Exciting announcement of GitLab collaboration!

![OpenCores](https://cdn.opencores.org/pad/OC_logo_newsletter.png)

Dear community members,

If you have a "full account" this news is especially relevant for you,
if not... consider upgrading by sending us an email!

In all cases you can read about the "close and submit your bugs" campaign further down in this news item.

**We recently worked on revising and improving your public/private/extended profile**.

https://opencores.org/profile

The extended profile was an attempt (in the good spirit of OC-legacy awkwardness™️) to make OC-user profiles more complete, giving the opportunity to highlight more in-depth expertise (long before other social media came to life). *We think it is still a valuable tool in our very specialized community, so we encourage you to fill it in and let us know what you think!* The profile can also be updated and linked to other social media channels now, if you use them.
Click the help button in the profile menu to read further about options.

Further on updates, you can now better select what you display or hide from the "public profile" view.
In the "public view" you can get a quick at-a-glance overview of your (or of other users) project(s), forum activity, and submitted bugs.

Concerning bugs: **did you know that OC-projects had a rudimentary** (and poorly used, in the good spirit of OC-legacy awkwardness™️) **bug tracker?**

*We challenge you to go for a "close your bugs" campaign... or "submit your bugs" campaign!*

By doing so you will slowly gain credits and credibility in the community and standout more among the users.
We are planning to introduce some fun rewarding system in the coming months...
and clever bug reporting/solving will play a role in your scores!

**Remember: a good IP Core has bugs found, reported... and fixed!**

We are planning to provide better bug tracking possibilities in the coming future,
so keep an eye on that section of your project(s)!

Have you got any further question or you want to give us feedback?
Please get in touch with us: oc-team@opencores.org

We hope you'll enjoy and make good use of the tools!

Best,
/:/ OC-team


track, report and close bugs you'll gain visibility and so your project(s)!

close your bugs campaign and other fresh news

![OpenCores](https://cdn.opencores.org/pad/OC_logo_newsletter.png)

Dear community members,

First of all: Happy New Gregorian year!

The OC-team started 2019 with renewed energy and the motivation to take our website and community one step further.

We are planning lots of activities and are already actively working on setting up new collaborations which will help us achieving our goals. We are also strengthening the ones with Nikhef and ASTRON with the hope to offer better quality content.

In parallel to those activities we invested again some time and effort to improve the user experience on our site.

**We are pleased to announce that the project description page is now based on markdown syntax and it can be parsed (optionally) directly from a README.md residing in the svn repo.**

The handling and linking of images got also simplified as you now can link to images stored in svn as well.
For site consistency we decided to still keep the "Downloads" (which is in fact also "Uploads", in the good spirit of OC legacy awkwardness™️), and you could also store your images there as you did in the past.

For backward compatibility all the old project pages written in html will remain unchanged until a maintainer
clicks the edit button and saves the page. The translation from html to markdown is automatically done by us for you,
at that moment. The new editor comes with basic syntax support, and we are confident that stack exchange will fill the remaining gaps.

We hope you will take advantage of the new features and make your project overview more captivating,
and easier to grasp after a quick read! 

**Remember: a good IP Core requires equally good documentation!**

For further information please refer to: https://opencores.org/howto/project \[still in the making as we announce the feature]

Have you got any further question or you want to give us feedback?
Please get in touch with us: oc-team@opencores.org

We hope you'll enjoy!

Best,
/:/ OC-team

project description can now parse markdown files from svn sources

OC-site: updated handling of the project page

Borga, Andrea

Held in conjunction with the 
**Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference** [(DATE)](http://date-conference.com/). 
**Friday, March 29, 2019; Florence, Italy.** 
Workshop dedicated website [(OSDA)](https://osda.gitlab.io/).


FPGA are increasingly finding themselves in huge data-centers as well as in the hands of hobbyists. However the wide availability of these high and low cost devices contrasts with the narrow ways in which one can access them -- through proprietary closed-source tools and IP -- which can hamper the realisation and deployment of novel FPGA-based applications and EDA innovations. Open-source is a proven and prevalent success when it comes to CPU and GPU silicon, and there are already efforts to drive reconfigurable silicon towards the same trend.

This one-day workshop aims to bring together industrial, academic, and hobbyist actors to explore, disseminate, and network over ongoing efforts for open design automation, with a view to enabling unfettered research and development, improving EDA quality, and lowering the barriers and risks to entry for industry. These aims are particularly poignant due to the recent efforts across the European Union (and beyond) that mandate “open access” for publicly funded research to both published manuscripts as well as any code necessary for reproducing its conclusions.

**Topics of interest** at OSDA include, but are not limited to:

* Open-source FPGA tools -- the latest developments, breakthroughs, challenges and surveys on the toolflows required to target real silicon parts: synthesis, simulation, place and route, etc.
* Open-source IP for FPGA -- contributions that enrich the IP ecosystem and reduce the need to “re-invent the wheel”, e.g. PCIe and DDR controllers, debug infrastructure, etc.
* Design methodologies provided as open-source -- such as alternative hardware description languages (e.g. derived from Python, Scala), domain specific languages (DSL), high level synthesis (HLS), asynchronous methods, and others.
* Directions on where the open-source FPGA movement should go, current weaknesses in the toolchain, and/or perspectives from industry on how open-source can affect aspects of safety, security, verification, IP protection, time-to-market, datacenter/cloud infrastructure, etc.
* Discussions and case studies on how to license, acquire funding, and commercialise technologies surrounding open-source hardware, which may be different to open software.

**Important dates**

* Submission deadline: December 17, 2018
* Notification of acceptance: January 14, 2019
* Camera-ready final version: February 11, 2019
* Workshop: March 29, 2019

**Submission details and requirements
**

Prospective authors are invited to submit original contributions (up to six pages), extended abstracts describing work-in-progress or position papers (not exceeding two pages), and demo proposals that would be of general interest. Papers must be submitted as an A4-sized PDF, in the IEEE conference format.

In line with OSDA’s mission, we encourage and will favour submissions that make all artifacts used for experimentation (benchmarks, code, etc.) available for private peer-review. Accepted submissions are required to publish these artifacts under an OSI-approved (preferably permissive) license. The proceedings of this workshop containing all accepted papers will be published on the open-access arXiv repository. Every accepted paper must have at least one author registered to the workshop by January 31.

*Organising Team:*

* Eddie Hung, University of British Columbia, Canada
* Christian Krieg, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
* Clifford Wolf, Symbiotic EDA, Austria

*Programme Committee:*

* Andrea Borga, oliscience, Netherlands
* Shane Fleming, Imperial College London, UK
* Hipolito Guzman-Miranda, University of Sevilla, Spain
* Steve Hoover, Redwood EDA, USA
* Dirk Koch, University of Manchester, UK
* Mieszko Lis, University of British Columbia, Canada
* Brent Nelson, Brigham Young University, USA
* Steffen Reith, RheinMain University of Applied Sciences, Germany
* Davide Rossi, University of Bologna, Italy


New initiative in the European academic and research landscape for EDA development

Call for Contributions: Workshop on Open Source Design Automation (OSDA) 2019

Dear users,

With tonight's major intervention we hope to have solved the long standing issues 
with the mail server for good.

This should also guarantee far less potential disruptions and Spam attacks.

Best,
/:/ OC-team

The scheduled maintenance is now successfully completed.

OC-site: maintenance of the mail server [completed]

Dear users,

After long sought planning we start today at 19:00 CET an overhaul of the mail server.
Planned work include:

*) migrate from postfix to exim mail server
*) implement SRS and SPF for better sever white listing in Google services
*) implement better Spam filtering and shielding
*) general revision of all mail-sending services on the portal to ensure reliability

The service will be going up and down for the rest of the evening...
Not that it was working so brilliantly recently anyway...8)

We hope this will solve many of the issues related to this service.

Best,
/:/ OC-team

Scheduled maintenance tonight (24/09) starting from 19:00 CET

OC-site: maintenance of the mail server

Dear users,

The malfunction was due to a 15 minutes long crash of the OC-server yesterday evening (Central European Time). This is now repaired and back to normal.

We will put more effort in the coming future to increase the overall reliability of our infrastructure.

Best,
/:/ OC-team

The project listing and user registration are back online

OC-site: project listing malfunction [solved]

Dear users,

Due to unexpected problems related to an upgrade of the project listing and user registration pages,
those services are temporarily unavailable.

We are working hard on a prompt fix.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Best,
/:/ OC-team

The project listing and registration page are temporarily unavailable

OC-site: project listing malfunction

[![OpenCores.org](http://opencores.org/img,pad,OC_logo_newsletter.png)](http://opencores.org/redirect.php?id=7)

# OpenCores announces new partnership with ASTRON

## ASTRON becomes an OpenCores partner to speed up the process of engineering their tools for science

  

**Amsterdam, 18 June**

Last week Wednesday, a representative from Oliscience visited ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy ([www.astron.nl](http://www.astron.nl)), for the official signature ceremony.

As announced earlier by the institute itself on its own news [page](http://astron.nl/astron-and-nikhef-collaborate), more effort will be put in the participation and support to the community by the digital designers team of the laboratory.

_"Nowadays, programming gateware IP Cores is a very complicated task and only specialised electrical engineers can do this"_ said Daniel van der Schuur, digital design engineer at ASTRON. _"That is why we benefit from working together on an online portal as OpenCores; here we can effectively share our designs to avoid effort duplication and foster reuse and distribution in the spirit of Free and Open Source."_

The aim of the OpenCores community, consisting of scientific institutions and industrial enterprises, is clearly in line with the ambitions of ASTRON, which mission is first and foremost to design instruments for scientific experiments, but also to valorize and disseminate knowledge. Being part of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), ASTRON is the second [NWO-I](https://www.nwo-i.nl/en/nwo-institutes-organisation/about-nwo-i/) institute joining this innovative initiative, the first one being [Nikhef](http://www.nikhef.nl) earlier last year. ASTRON and Nikhef strongly believe in the value of Oliscience and its mission to empower the OpenCores portal and community.  

_"I am very happy that ASTRON is now a partner of OpenCores,"_ says Andrea Borga, CEO of Oliscience. _"FPGA-based technology and gateware engineering is clearly a multidisciplinary field of development, so I am delighted to see that engineers from Nikhef and ASTRON can provide cross-application platforms and further collaborate on the underlying technologies essential for their respective scientific discoveries. This leaves to OpenCores the task to provide and run the appropriate infrastructure, allowing institutions to focus on their technical work. We really hope that this trend of support will continue with more institutions and companies coming together on our community portal."_

Interested in knowing more about the OpenCores partnership program? Please get in touch with us [oc-team@opencores.org](mailto:oc-team@opencores.org?Subject=OpenCores%20Membership%20program)  
  
Best,  
/:/ OC-team

OpenCores is the world's largest site/community focusing on Free and Open source gateware IP Cores development and dissemination.

(c) Copyright Opencores.org, equivalent to Oliscience.nl. All rights reserved. OpenCores®, registered trademark.


ASTRON becomes an OpenCores partner to speed up the process of engineering their tools for science


OpenCores announces new partnership with ASTRON

[![OpenCores.org](http://opencores.org/img,pad,OC_logo_newsletter.png)](http://opencores.org/redirect.php?id=7)

# New feature: code metrics user ranking

## code metrics user ranking

  

**Amsterdam, 08 December**

Dear OC-users,

Right after the launch earlier in September, we started working on the addition of small features we had in mind since a while. With those slowly appearing, we aim at improving and enhancing the quality of our community, its content, and the overall liking and fun on the site. One area of development we're currently focusing on is the design and implementation of simple and effective code quality metrics based on user feedback.

The two new features deployed today are: (i) a starring system of the cores, (ii) a better overview on the number of bugs reported and solved per core.

As you will progressively start giving feedback on contributions, the good quality cores will start naturally emerging and strengthen the scores on the charts displayed on the homepage.  
_Many stars: good!_  
_Many bugs reported (and fixed): good!_  
We also believe that giving a little star to contributors gives and shows a little token of appreciation and acknowledges their effort and their work. Needless to reinforce that bug reports and fixes are a sound proof of the power of community based design peer review and extensive shared verification.

These two features are now available in the "details" section of every project.

**Do you have suggestions, opinions, feedback?** Please don't hesitate to contact us at [oc-team@opencores.org](mailto:oc-team@opencores.org?Subject=Code%20Metrics%20feedback).

Now go and have fun!  
  
Best,  
/:/ OC-team

OpenCores is the world's largest site/community focusing on Free and Open source gatware IP core development and dissemination.

(c) Copyright Opencores.org, equivalent to Oliscience.nl. All rights reserved. OpenCores®, registered trademark.


Two new features deployed today: (i) a starring system of the cores, (ii) a better overview on the number of bugs reported and solved per core.


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OpenCores and general hardware news