Open-source Hardware: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract: Innovation in hardware is slowing due to rising costs of chip design and diminishing benefits from Moore's law and Dennard scaling. Software innovation, on the other hand, is flourishing, helped in good measure by a thriving open-source ecosystem. We believe that open source can similarly help hardware innovation, but has not yet due to several reasons. We identify these reasons and how the industry, academia, and the hardware community at large can come together to address them.