The FOSSi Foundation's inagural Antipodean conference, Down Underflow, will be held on Saturday February 28th in Sydney, Australia.
We're pleased to annonunce a few updates for the event including our first batch of speakers, the venue and our first gold sponsor.
Down Underflow?
Yes, Down Underflow! This is what we've branded our Antipodean franchise of open source silicon community conferences, following in the footsteps its North American-centric Latch-Up and European-based ORConf bretheren.
It'll be in a similar fashion, although a little smaller for the inagural affair, held during a weekend and free to attend, full of the latest and greatest open source silicon news and reviews and networking. The latter being a major focus of the event, providing a place and time interested folks can gather to spend as much time talking in the halways as listening to presentations and usually well into the night.
We really are community focused and want to lower barriers to attend so the event is free with donations gladly accepted.
You can expect the content of the event to cover all things open-source semiconductor, digital design and embedded systems. Presentations will address 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.
S3B Gold Sponsor
We are extremely pleased to announce the generous sponsorship by the NSW Semiconductor Sector Service Bureau (S3B) as the first Gold Sponsor of the inagural Down Underflow!
The S3B are now instrumental in supporting the development of the semiconductor industry in the Australian state of New South Wales and we're very pleased to have them involved with our inaugural FOSSi Foundation event in Australia.
First speakers
Head over to our talks section of the Down Underflow page, we have our first handful of excellent talks covering open source tapeouts with wafer.space, experiences teaching RTL to GDS with OpenROAD, Verilog tooling based on Slang, a Cocotb update, and some insight on using open source silicon tooling and IP in startups.
Presentation slots are still available, and we'd welcome and encourage folks to submit a talk on either their experience contributing to or using open source semiconductor IP, tools and flows. Slots of 20 minutes or lightning talks are available.
Your presentation submissions can be made when you register for the event. Or simply email the organizers at downunderflow@fossi-foundation.org.
All presentations at Down Underflow 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!
Register To Attend
The event will be free of charge but attendees are required to register.
Head over to the Down Underflow event site site for all the details of the event.
Supporting Down Underflow
Down Underflow is free of charge to attend, but not free to run.
Events like Down Underflow 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 Down Underflow a success.
When and where
Down Underflow 2026 will be held in Sydney, Australia. The event will begin with doors opening at 9AM on Saturday February 28th, and will be followed by a social event at a pub close to the venue.
We are very grateful to Morse Micro for offering to host us this year. Their offices are located close to Sydney's Central Station, so for those of visitng, if you're close to a train line or central Sydney, it will be very easily accessible.
We very much look forward to seeing everyone at Down Underflow in February.
Again all information can be found on the Down Underflow event site including how to contact organizers and details of the Matrix chat room for the event.
Hoo roo.