Milkymist was founded in summer 2007 by Sébastien Bourdeauducq. The open source project tackled the development of a system-on-chip design capable of running MilkDrop. The name "Milkymist" was chosen to evoke a parallel MilkDrop. The development was no small task, as it required designing and/or integrating a powerful 32-bit microprocessor core, basic peripherals, many interfaces, a fast SDRAM controller, and graphics acceleration. The video synthesizer born out of those efforts, the Milkymist One, was launched in September 2011 with the help of open hardware company Sharism at Work.

Components of the Milkymist system-on-chip soon found many other uses, such as software-defined radio on board the International Space Station. The community grew and activities diversified, with the development of a TDC core for CERN (using a variant of the Milkymist SoC for integration), the Migen logic design system and its application to the Rhino software-defined radio platform, and the Mixxeo digital video mixer. In 2013, Milkymist was renamed to M-Labs to mark the more varied activities. It is formally incorporated as M-Labs Limited.

The company's current main project is ARTIQ, a next-generation open source control system for quantum information experiments.

Get in touch

We'd love to hear from you! Here is how you can communicate with us.

For most questions and feedback, the best way is to use the mailing list. If you do not know how, simply send your message to devel at lists dot m-labs dot hk. Sébastien's email address is sb at m-labs dot hk but it is often better to use the mailing list (for example, other people may reply to technical questions, and answers stay archived and searchable).

A good means of contact is also the IRC channel #m-labs on Freenode.

Finally, you can follow our Twitter account.

Patches should be sent to the mailing list, preferably using git-format-patch. Please do not use GitHub pull requests.