Announcing the LibreCores design contest and ORConf 2016

Our friends and collaborators at the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation have launched the LibreCores design contest. This is a student design contest which aims to recognise and reward contributions to the open source hardware ecosystem. The main evaluation criteria are:

  • Openness. Your work must be published under an established Open Source license.
  • Reusability. How easily can your work be used and modified by someone else? Is it well documented? Do you plan to continue to work on your project and help others to get started?
  • Usefulness. Is your work filling a much-needed gap in the world of Open Source hardware design? Something that was not there before?

See the design contest site for full details. The deadline for submission is August 31st, 2016. Entrants will have the opportunity to present their work at ORConf, with some travel funding available thanks to the sponsors.

This neatly leads me to the next activity I wanted to highlight in this post. Again, thanks to the hard work of our friends at FOSSi, registration is now open for ORConf 2016. To quote that page: “ORCONF is an open source digital design and embedded systems conference, covering areas of electronics from the transistor level up to Linux user space and beyond. Expect presentations and discussion on free and open source IP projects, implementations on FPGA and in silicon, verification, EDA tools, licensing and embedded software”.

Last year’s ORConf was the biggest and most enthusiastic event focused on open source digital design I’ve ever been to, and saw the birth of the FOSSi Foundation. Please do register to attend and submit talks. With the growing interest in open source hardware and open source digital logic design, I expect it will be even bigger and better than last year. ORConf 2016 will be held at the University of Bologna in Italy between October 7th and October 9th. Register now.

Alex Bradbury