In the summer of 2007, Sébastien Bourdeauducq, while a student at <ahref="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sup%C3%A9lec">Supélec</a>, founded an open source project that tackled the development of a system-on-chip capable of running the GPU-accelerated music visualizer <ahref="http://www.geisswerks.com/milkdrop/">MilkDrop</a>. The name "Milkymist" was chosen to evoke a parallel MilkDrop - as digital hardware is inherently parallel. 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 fairly advanced graphics acceleration. The video synthesizer born out of those efforts, the <ahref="/gateware/m1/">Milkymist One</a>, was launched in September 2011 with the help of the open hardware company Sharism at Work. As of April 2021, the Milkymist system-on-chip (SoC) remains the most advanced open source implementation of a SoC with graphics acceleration.
Components of the Milkymist SoC soon found many other uses, such as <ahref="/images/jpl_letter.jpg"target="_blank"rel="noopener noreferrer">software-defined radio</a> on board the International Space Station. The community grew and activities diversified, with the development of a <ahref="http://www.ohwr.org/projects/tdc-core/wiki"target="_blank"rel="noopener noreferrer">TDC core</a> for CERN (using a variant of the Milkymist SoC for integration), the <ahref="/gateware/migen/">Migen</a> logic design system and its application to the Rhino software-defined radio platform, and the <ahref="/other/mixxeo">Mixxeo</a> digital video mixer. In 2013, Milkymist was renamed to M-Labs to match the more varied activities, and formally incorporated as M-Labs Limited.
Since 2014, the company's main project is <ahref="/experiment-control/artiq/">ARTIQ</a>, a leading-edge open source control system for quantum information experiments. In 2016, Robert Jördens joined the directorate of the company to further develop ARTIQ and other physics-related projects. Commercial hardware developed specifically for ARTIQ, codenamed Sinara, started appearing in 2017 thanks to a collaboration with Grzegorz Kasprowicz from the Warsaw Insitute of Technology.
