High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Open source hardware is hardware that is designed and offered in the same manner as free and open source software. Open source hardware is part of the open source culture and applies the open source concept to hardware. Open source hardware usually means that information about the hardware is open to all. This would include the hardware design, as well as a FOSS approach to the software that drives the hardware. Since the rise of reconfigurable programmable logic devices, sharing of logic designs has been a form of open source hardware. Instead of sharing the schematics, as in hardware description language, code is shared. HDL descriptions are commonly used to set up system-on-a-chip systems either in field-programmable gate arrays or directly in application-specific integrated circuit designs. HDL modules, when distributed, are called semiconductor intellectual property cores, or IP cores.