The 7 Elements oSi IP (intellectual property, i.e. concept, model, designs, and implementation) are
covered under the GNU GPL
(General Public License), and are protected by international copyright
and patent law. Any hardware vendor fabricating oSi designs in hardware
must provide the 'source code' for the chip (masks, reference pcb board
gerber files, etc) in addition to delivery of physical hardware. Commercial
licenses are available for fabricators who may desire alternative distribution
terms. Please contact Troy for alternative license details.
The 7 Elements oSi (open Silicon) model
Solar and Wind energy systems need intelligent energy management,
which includes the intelligent mind of the energy user as part of
the system. The Grid Co-op software
provides the mind-fire interface between the intelligent people
and flow of electrons in wires and silicon. To complete the circuit,
we must have open source hardware for the software to run on.
The open Silicon model will provide several reference designs for
power switching and control. 7 Elements intends to be the fabricator
of choice for oSi silicon, and we also recognize we cannot meet the
needs of every possible use case for the design, so we encourage other
silicon vendors to collaborate with us, or independently fabricate
derivatives of these designs.
CCu Module
The 7 Elements CCu (Carbon and Copper) module reference design
will be a single-PCB multi-chip module with a multi-channel
H-bridge with inductors, high-speed A/D, and an FPGA capable
of implementing the link layer of the
InfiniBand FPGA project along with an appropriate OpenCores MCU.
The physical layer will be modeled on a combination of 802.3af
(POE) and a 25Mhz clock rate (cDR, Centi data rate) for InfiniBand
with 8b/10b encoding.