Hello, all,

Would there be community interest in buying and using an open-hardware FPGA? If so, how much would you be willing to pay for one, and what features or specs would you need it to have?

For those who don't know, an FPGA, or field programmable gate array, is a sort of uber-chip that can be programmed to act like any other chip (up to a certain size). So if you want a particular kind of CPU core, you can download a specification, load it on to an FPGA, and have a working version of that core.

Currently, open hardware CPU implementations like OpenRISC have to be actually instantiated on proprietary, non-open-hardware FPGAs. An open hardware FPGA would allow you to build a fully open project without proprietary components, while allowing easy modification of the CPU core (or whatever else you are using the FPGA to implement).

Who would be interested in such a project/product?