Continuing with its SPARC open-source program, Sun Microsystems has made available the RTL (Register Transfer Level) processor designs for the UltraSPARC T2 processor.

An excerpt from InternetNews:

“The intent is to build an ecosystem around the platform,” Fadi Azhari, director of marketing in the Sun Microelectronics Group told InternetNews.com. “UltraSPARC is fairly radical in processing technology. Chip multithreading requires a new paradigm and developer sets. What we did was we targeted this program so developers, academic institutions, or companies can use it to understand the inner working of the chip to optimize tools and their operating environment.”

Open-sourcing processor designs has been well-termed as a “seeding” process to create communities of developers to optimize applications that are developed for the processor.

As part of the the academic initiative, Sun has also recognized five U.S. universities as “OpenSPARC Centers of Excellence.” These universities include: University of California, Santa Cruz; University of Texas, Austin; University of Michigan; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and Carnegie Mellon University.

The RTL files for the OpenSPARC T2 Processor can be downloaded from the OpenSPARC site.

Sun appears to be following in the foot steps of IBM, which first open-sourced its Power Architecture at Power.org.

More information:

Sun open-sources T2 processor (TG Daily)

Sun accelerates growth of UltraSPARC(R) CMT Eco System (BusinessWire)