First of all, congratulations to the OpenSPARC Community Innovation Award winners.

I find the research of Kushal Datta particularly interesting. He is developing CASPER, a parameterized cycle-accurate simulator that allows the user to vary a number of microarchitectural parameters in OpenSPARC T1 for performance analysis.

Meanwhile, developers working in the industry, such as those at Cosmic Horizon, endeavor to make it easier for people to engage in development on OpenSPARC.

Understand that OpenSPARC is not the central focus of Cosmic Horizon. SPARC-V9 in general is. Nevertheless, I wish to make a substantial contribution to the OpenSPARC community. One contribution will become substantial when I finish it. That is the enhancements to Icarus Verilog that will allow it to compile parts of OpenSPARC T1 that it did not understand when I began the project, and hopefully all of OpenSPARC T2. Imagine what the OpenSPARC community will be able to do with a free Verilog compiler that can handle such complex designs.

But my level of effort is tied to Sun's stock price, and JAVA is currently trading at 5.78.

I wrote last time that I would switch to OpenSPARC T1 chip design 1.6 release. For some reason, I failed to do that, so I'm downloading it now.

And there really is nothing to report, due to my level of effort.

I'm just doing the occasional git pull of Icarus Verilog, then verifying that the behavior of interest has not changed. The next step is to commit, but I think I'm hung up on needing to re-learn something basic about Git. With a daily time allocation typically less than 10 minutes, I always run out of time before making any real progress.

As Sun's stock price goes higher, my contribution to OpenSPARC will return to its previously "substantial" pace.