Given their stated goals, it seems odd to me that Oxide would even consider a chip with proprietary blobs; are there not good open options available?

Suggestions very much welcome! Unfortunately, this space does not really have any good open options: certainly, there is no ARM MCU that meets our security constraints and also has open firmware. (Indeed, there is no ARM MCU that I am aware of that has a completely open ecosystem; all of them have some proprietary bits, though some less than others.) Longer term, we are bullish on RISC-V, but it's not there yet with the security features that we need (e.g., a PUF) -- and we are not in the position (yet!) to make our own ASIC. (We took a hard look at using a secure FPGA for our root of trust, but the best solution we found in the space made NXP look downright open.)

Again, suggestions welcome -- and we are very optimistic that our options will be much better in the coming decade!

sennight

You might be interested in what Anton Blanchard has been up to with the power ISA soft cores, it seems like his work has spanned the bulk of the FPGA toolkits, and I think his latest is taped out for the SKY130 run. His work is also being adapted for an openBMC replacement, which would offer an opportunity to dust off some old Xzibit templates, so thats good.

https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt

https://github.com/antonblanchard/chiselwatt

https://www.efabless.com/projects/29

https://gitlab.raptorengineering.com/kestrel-collaboration/k...