"Most importantly, we have to change the culture of hardware design. Today, we don’t have open sharing … "
This, to the 100th power.
The culture in the EDA industry is stuck in the 1950's when it comes to collaboration and sharing, it's very frustrating for newcomers and people who want to learn the trade.
As was pointed out by someone in another hardware related HN thread, what can you expect from an industry that is still stuck calling a component "Intellectual Property"?
The un-sharing is built into the very names used to describe things.
>> "Most importantly, we have to change the culture of hardware design. Today, we don’t have open sharing … "
I'll have popcorn ready for the eventuality where IP blocks are widely available under GPL type of FOSS licenses and Intel|AMD|ARM|TI|... is eventually found to include one or more of those open sourced blocks with incompatible license in their chips.
First off, the RISC-V community is based on the open ISA. There are several open implementations of the ISA. And the RISC-V community is meaking good headways in developing open tools, peripheral cores etc.
Secondly there are at least two attempts at collecting and tracking open cores for FPGA- and ASIC-implementations.
LibreCores is the newer project. They have collected quite a few projects:
https://www.librecores.org/ https://www.librecores.org/project/list
Related to LibreCores is the SoC-builder and core package handler Fusesoc by Olof Kindgren. Fusesoc makes creating your SoC easy:
https://github.com/olofk/fusesoc
The older project is OpenCores. OpenCores has been quite tightly related to the OpenRISC CPU core, the wishbone set of on-chip interconnect solutions. They have been used in many FPGAs and ASICs
https://opencores.org/ https://openrisc.io/
Then you have projects like Cryptech that develops a complete, totally open, Hardware Security Module capable of doing certificate signing, OpenDNSSEC signing etc. The Cryptech Alpha design from PCB to FPGA cores and SW including pkcs11 handling is open. The project has amassed quite a few cores. The PCB design is available in kiCAD. (disclaimer: I'm part of the Cryptech core team doing a lot of the FPGA design work.)
https://cryptech.is/ https://trac.cryptech.is/wiki/GitRepositories
Speaking of tools like KiCAD, there are aqtually quite a few open tools for HW design. For simuation there are Icarus Verilog, Verilator, cver for example. They might not be as fast as VCS by Synoptsys. But they do work. I use them daily.
http://iverilog.icarus.com/ https://www.veripool.org/projects/verilator/wiki/Intro
For synthesis, P&R the state is less good. For implementation in Altera and Xilinx devices you currently have to use the cost free tools from the vendors. But there is work ongoing to reverse engineer Xilinx Spartan devices. I don't know the current state though.
But what has been reverse engineered are the ICE40 FPGA devices from Lattice. And for these you can use the open tool Yosys by Clifford Wolf (also mentioned below by someone else).
And if you are looking for open implementations of crypto functions etc I have quite a few on Github and try to develop more all the time:
The sha256 and aes cores has been used in quite a few FPGA and ASIC designs. Right now I'm working on completing cores for the Blake2b and Blake2s hash functions.
I agree that we in the HW community is waay behind the SW community in terms of open tools, libraries (i.e. cores). But it is not totally rotten, and it is getting better. RISC-V is to me really exciting.