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 <ahref="/gateware/m1/">Milkymist One</a>, 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 <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 mark the more varied activities, and formally incorporated in Hong Kong as M-Labs Limited.
The company's current 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.
