Earlier today, we announced that QuickLogic has joined the Open Source FPGA (OSFPGA) Foundation as a Founding and Premier Member. The mission of this new foundation is to expand the market for, and accelerate the adoption of programmable logic, by uniting the efforts of companies, universities, and individuals worldwide. The foundation will also provide a platform to make it easier for members to collaborate as well as promote outreach and education on behalf of the open source community.

You might recall that we began embracing open source tools about a year ago and have since committed to, and contributed toward, a fully open source toolchain for FPGA user software. That made us a natural fit for the OSFPGA foundation and is the primary reason we became both a Founding and a Premier member of the organization.

We’re in good company as you can see from the OSFPGA website – the other founding members are either semiconductor industry veterans (such as Naveed Sherwani, Shrikant Lohokare, Andreas Olofsson, and Serge Leef to name a few) or widely recognized academics (Pierre-Emmanuel Gaillardon, Xifan Tang, Vaughn Betz, and Giovanni de Micheli.)

So why does joining and contributing to the growth of this new foundation make good business sense for QuickLogic? For the same reasons why we embraced open source tools and launched our own QuickLogic Open Reconfigurable Computing (QORC) initiative. Namely, we want to expand our served market by reducing the cost and complexity of implementing and designing for FPGA technology and accelerate the time to market for new product introductions. Broader adoption means more applications and more customers and ultimately, more revenue.

The OSFPGA Foundation will create technical working groups focused on standardization of methodologies and toolchains and launch educational initiatives to teach people how to use the tools and IP. All of these will help the technology become more accessible and easier to use. By encouraging coordinated efforts to create a complete and cohesive development ecosystem, we can accelerate the use of FPGA technology. We want to be at the leading edge of this effort and believe that we’ll see significant benefits in return.