News from the FOSSi Foundation
Latest news
ORConf is back!
ORConf is back! We've returned with yet another open source chip design tour de force courtesy of the brilliant community, our first since the previous outing in Bordeaux in 2019. The years have been kind, it seems to us all; with much progress to be presented and discussed over the three days being hosted by the University of Applied Sciences in beautiful Munich.

El Correo Libre Issue 61
That was fun! Exhausting, but fun. I'm of course talking about Latch-Up in Santa Barbara, our first conference since ORConf in 2019. Having organized open source silicon conferences since 2012, I pretty much knew what we were getting into, but at some level I had forgotten exactly how much work it really is.

El Correo Libre Issue 60
We have once again been selected as a mentor organisation for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2023. Google Summer of Code is an excellent program for new open-source contributors to receive a stipend (generously provided by Google) to contribute to open source projects in the FOSSi community. As an organisation, we encompass a variety of community projects in the space of open source silicon design, EDA tools, and the surrounding ecosystem.

Apply Now For GSoC 2023!
We have once again been selected as a mentor organisation for
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2023.
Google Summer of Code is an excellent program for new open-source
contributors to receive a stipend (generously provided by Google) to
contribute to open source projects in the FOSSi community. As an
organisation, we encompass a variety of community projects in the
space of open source silicon design, EDA tools, and the surrounding
ecosystem.

Apply Now For GSoC 2022!
We have once again been selected as a mentor organisation for
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2022.
Google Summer of Code is an excellent program for new open-source
contributors to receive a stipend (generously provided by Google) to
contribute to open source projects in the FOSSi community. As an
organisation, we encompass a variety of community projects in the
space of open source silicon design, EDA tools, and the surrounding
ecosystem.

Become a GSoC student 2021!
We are delighted to announce that we have once again been selected
as a mentor organisation for the 2021 edition of
Google Summer of Code (GSoC)
Google Summer of Code is an excellent program for students to receive
a stipend (generously provided by Google) to contribute to open
source projects in the FOSSi community. As an organisation, we serve
as an umbrella org for projects in the space of open source silicon
design, EDA tools, and the surrounding ecosystem.

Embench 1.0 Benchmark Suite for IoT Class Devices Released
The Embench group announces the first full release of its free and open source benchmark suite for IoT class devices. The benchmark suite, comprising 19 real programs, has proved popular across industry and academia since the pre-release version 0.5 was made available in February 2020. The project is developed by an open group, with contributors from companies and universities worldwide. The code is available under a free and open source license on GitHub (see github.com/embench/embench-iot).

Google Summer of Code 2020
Since 2016 the FOSSi Foundation has participated every year in the Google Summer of Code, a Google-sponsored summer internship for students from all over the world.
We are honored to be part of GSoC again this year.
As in previous years, the FOSSi Foundation acts as an umbrella organization, supporting community members to mentor students in their respective FOSSi-related projects.

GSoC Project Report: Continuous Integration for Hardware Projects on LibreCores CI
Librecores provides a platform to share projects and ideas, in the area of free and open-source digital hardware design. Librecores CI is a service to provide CI for hardware projects hosted on Librecores to improve user experience and reliability.

OpenHW Group Announced
Today the OpenHW Group was
announced. This is yet another great step for Free and Open Source
Silicon. With the rise of RISC-V we have seen some great momentum
beyond the processor cores itself. We now see groups growing from and
around the RISC-V ecosystem with big players involved. This strongly
confirms our story and we look forward to the next months of
continuous growth of the FOSSi community.

Become a LibreCores.org contributor or contractor
LibreCores.org is a modern portal for Free
and Open Source Silicon (FOSSi). Our aim is that it becomes the entry
point to find and promote high quality free and open source digital IP
blocks, free and open source platforms and free and open EDA
tools. The focus is on user collaboration, for example by
recommendations, and providing a simple interface to understand the
fitness of a project.

RS Components sponsors Open Source Digital Design Conference
LONDON, UK, 11 August, 2017 - RS Components (RS), the trading brand of Electrocomponents plc (LSE:ECM), the global distributor for engineers, is sponsoring ORConf, an open source digital design and embedded systems conference that covers from the transistor level up to Linux user space and beyond — featuring presentations and discussion on free and open source IP projects, implementations on FPGA and in silicon, verification, EDA tools, licensing and embedded software, to name but a few.

Prelude to orconf 2017 - Open Source Digital Design Insights
Over the years orconf has grown to be the most prominent conference for
open source silicon, and with presentations from some of the most
interesting open source silicon projects lined up, this year does not
seem to be an exception. Our audience can expect to learn about brand new
projects as well as updates from long-running ones.

OSH Park sponsor the FOSSi Foundation
We are pleased to announce that OSH Park,
the purveyors of perfect purple PCBs, have become sponsors of the FOSSi
Foundation's activities. We are very grateful for their support
and would like to recognize this by listing them on
our Sponsors page at the Bronze tier.

Google Summer of Code 2017
We just get the word from Google that FOSSi Foundation has been selected to
participate in Google Summer of Code 2017
. Just as last year, we are very happy about this great opportunity to mentor
students around the world who want to contribute to FOSSi
projects. Last year we had three excellent students who all made great
contributions and we look forward to meet new students this year.

Tensilica Day Wrapup and RISC-V Event in Munich
Today I visited Hanover to talk at the Tensilica Day 2017. I was
invited by the Cadence Academic Network to give some insights into the
state of open source processors and FOSSi. The audience was mainly
academic and working on application-specific instruction-set
processors (ASIP) and hence some thoughts about the open source
ecosystem were welcome very much. It was an interesting event and I
had some great discussions. Please find my slides
here.

FOSSi Licensing: Planned Activities
The Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation aims to clarify the
licensing situation for Free and Open Source Silicon (FOSSi)
designs. Licensing of FOSSi is similar to that of Free and Open Source
Software (FOSS), but the process of making a chip and the industry
conditions vary a lot. The following assumes the reader is familiar
with the basics of open source licensing, please see our
introduction as
reference.

FOSSi @ FOSDEM 2017: What can digital designers learn from software developers?
One of my favourite conferences every year is FOSDEM in Brussels.
This year I have the privilige to represent the FOSSi Foundation in the EDA Devroom, organized by our friend Javier Serrano.
I'll talk about Digital hardware design: What can we learn from software development – and what not.
Join me for a look at processes and tools that make the lifes of developers, both of software and hardware, easier.
What can we learn from each other?
Where are different approaches needed?

FOSSi Update and FOSDEM
After two months months of discussion and planning FOSSi Foundation is
making a lot of progress recently. Most importantly we are now
officially
registered as a
Community Interest Company (CIC) in the UK. This is a proper legal
body that we have chosen to run an independent, community-based
foundation. We are still in the process of opening a bank account
which seems to be more complex with our international officers.