The FOSSi Foundation is proud to announce Latch-Up 2026, a conference dedicated to free and open-source silicon to be held over the weekend of May 1-3 at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
Since its inception in 2019, have been moving the Latch-Up conference from coast to coast in the United States (Portland, Oregon in 2019, Santa Barbara in 2023 and 2025, and Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2024. This year we decided that Latch-Up should be representing (at least) all of North America, and have landed on Canada for this year's event, specifically the University of Waterloo in Ontario, about 50 miles west of the city of Toronto. The University of Waterloo is well known for its fine engineering school. As in the past, Latch-Up will be the familiar setup in the spirit of previous Latch-Up events (North America) and ORConf (Europe).
Latch-Up is a community-focused conference for open-source semiconductor, digital design and embedded systems professionals and enthusiasts. Expect presentations on a wide range of topics, both hardware and software: open-source IP blocks and SoCs, open-source simulators, compilers, HDLs, synthesis and physical implementation tools for both FPGA and ASIC, and open-source hardware initiatives. While Latch-Up concentrates on digital systems, talks on open-source analog, mixed-signal, and other related topics have been presented.
What is Latch-Up?
Technically speaking, a latch-up event is a hardware short circuit, an inadvertent path of low impedance. We have co-opted this word to represent what we’d like to encourage among members of the community: paths of communication leading to collaboration, inadvertent or not.
Latch-Up brings together the open-source digital design community in North America for an event in the mold of ORConf - the FOSSi Foundation’s annual European community conference. Like ORConf, Latch-Up is free to attend and consists of a relaxed format of presentations and discussions throughout a weekend, with plenty of time for networking. Latch-Up will consist of two full days of talks in a single-track forum followed by a shorter day of small-group discussions. As in the last several events, there will be a round of "lightning talks" as part of the dinner social event.
These events go to the FOSSi Foundations’ goal of lowering barriers of entry to the digital design field, whilst encouraging the open-source development model and promoting open collaboration.
Visiting Latch-Up
The event will be free of charge but attendees are required to register.
Head over to the Latch-Up event site to register and learn more about the planned schedule. Now is also a great time to book your travel, if you haven't done so already.
Speaking at Latch-Up
We invite anyone who is involved in any aspect of open-source digital design and embedded systems engineering to join us to present their work.
All presentations at Latch-Up will be recorded (with your permission) and posted on the FOSSi Foundation’s YouTube channel after the event.
As part of the registration, you are able to submit a full talk or a lightning talk. We're sure everyone has something cool to talk about and we look forward to what you have to share!
Supporting Latch-up
Latch-Up is free of charge to attend, but not free to run. Events like Latch-Up are a great way to get your brand in front of a passionate audience of engineers. Please get in touch if you’d like to view our sponsorship packages and help make Latch-Up a success.
We also need folks on the ground to lend a hand - so if you have any expertise in helping to run or staff such events, your help would be greatly appreciated, so please do get in touch to let us know you’d like to help out.
When and where
The conference will be held during the weekend of May 1-3, 2026 at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, about 50 miles west of Toronto, the closest major city.
All event information is available at latchup.io