This year we held the LibreCores Student Design Contest for the first time and it was a great success. We received six high quality submissions of open source silicon and its ecosystem from the last year (since October 2015).
The design contest put the focus on the openness of a design, which includes aspects like (re-)usability, an easy entry and the potential to build a substantial community around it.
The students had to submit their work along with answering questions that helped understanding the project. But the main judgement was based on the publicly available code and documentation. Beside that students had the chance to present their work at ORCONF 2016 either personally and/or with a poster.
We are very happy we had a first class industry jury that evaluated the submissions. Thanks a lot to the jury members!
Finally we got a winner and it is:
- Clarvi - A simple RISC-V implementation by Rob Eady (Univ. of Cambridge, UK)
Beside that we decided for a "special price for an open source EDA tool":
- OpenTimer: A High-performance Timing Analysis Tool by Tsung-Wei Huang (Univ. of Illinois, USA)
We congratulate the students! It has been a hard decision as the other submissions have been of an equally high quality:
- Video Mixing in Hardware by Shashank Gangrade (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, IN)
- ZAP: An ARM v4 compatible processor by Revanth Kamaraj (VEDA Institute of Information Technology, IN)
- nasti-ddrx-mc by Bittu N (BITS-Pilani, IN)
- Potstill Memory Generator by Fabian Schuiki (ETH Zurich, CH)
Thanks a lot for the great submissions! The call for next year will be released over the next weeks.