[mrsteveman1]

> Can someone please do a crowdfunding for a fully open source 802.11ac chipset and mini PCI express device?

A few RF transceivers and an FPGA like an Artix-7 (which has PCIe capability) might do the trick. It wouldn't be as cheap as a mass produced chipset, but a completely open 802.11ac chipset is unlikely to be mass produced anyway.

We already have examples of LTE base stations being run with SDR hardware like the LimeSDR, which is just an RF transceiver and an Altera FPGA, with a USB3 connection to the FPGA fabric.

In fact there are some SDR/FPGA dev kits that are Mini PCIe size and intended for use inside a laptop, specifically designed with LTE in mind[1].

So WiFi seems doable, even if you end up with a soft core CPU in the FPGA to do the same jobs WiFi chipset firmware is doing right now, at least you'd have full control over it and the firmware running on it.

[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/fairwaves/xtrx

[throwaway2048]

unfortunately the FPGA ecosystem is even more closed and open source unfriendly than the wifi hardware one, you aren't allowed to know anything about the chips, how code runs, or how to upload your own code, and you even have to use vendor specific IDEs and language extensions you are lucky if work anywhere outside of windows.

Current market FPGAs definitely aren't some shining beacon alternative to shitty hardware vendors, they are amongst the worst of the lot.

[mrsteveman1]

A few years ago that was true, and commercial tools are still horrid and closed and necessary for certain FPGA families.

But as of right now you can use[1] the Lattice iCE40 (small, 8k LUTs), Lattice UltraPlus (5k LUTs, DSPs) and Lattice ECP5[2] (~85k LUTs, with 5G SerDes and PCIe Gen 2) with completely open tools. The ECP5 in particular would be well suited for it.

And there is a productive effort[3] to do the same for the Artix-7 and other Xilinx 7 Series parts.

Even for those parts that are still very much closed, you can load an existing bitstream on them using open tools. Intel Max10, which is the part found on the LimeSDR Mini, is one of those even though we don't have open bitstream documentation for it yet.

The major commercial FPGA tools all work Linux at this point too, I use most of them on Ubuntu routinely including Lattice Diamond, Altera/Intel Quartus, and Xilinx ISE/Vivado.

[1] http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

[2] https://github.com/SymbiFlow/prjtrellis

[3] https://github.com/SymbiFlow/prjxray