Your Agile Open Source HW Stinks (Because It Is Not a System)

Exciting times in hardware design are upon us. Spearheaded by the RISC-V ISA, and the recent DARPA POSH/IDEA program which focuses on both open source IP and open source CAD, a large number of open source HW projects are underway. Academics are increasingly releasing their code online. Many agile open source HW projects envision a hypothetical user that may not actually exist. To acquire real users, we must be pragmatic about what kinds of systems our HW will go into and focus on the roadblocks unique to those systems.