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.
Over 200 major quantum physics experiments have been relying on ARTIQ as their main control and data acquisition system.
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