ORConf 2026
Friday to Sunday September 11–13, 2026 in Ghent, Belgium
The ORConf conference is a weekend of presentations and networking dedicated to free and open source silicon. It's an event for the open source silicon community, and is run by the FOSSi Foundation and its volunteers.
ORConf, the mystic lamb edition
The FOSSi Foundation is proud to announce the 12th installment of ORConf, a conference dedicated to free and open source silicon to be held in Ghent, Belgium over the weekend of Friday September 11 to Sunday September 13.
ORConf is a weekend of presentations and networking for the open source silicon community. Browse through previous installments of ORConf in our event archive.
Questions? Ping the organizers via email at orconf@fossi-foundation.org.
Venue
ORConf 2026 will be held in Ghent, Belgium at the Zebrastraat event center.
This year's ORConf will be co-located with FPL!
FPL, the 36th International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications, will take place in the same place from Monday, Sept 7 to Friday, Sept 11. If you're at FPL, stay for ORConf! And if you're not yet planning for FPL, maybe add it to your schedule?
Register
ORConf is free to attend. If you are able to, please help running the event by considering a "Pay what you want" ticket with an donation. People who are attending ORConf on behalf of their company are encouraged to donate in the form of a professional ticket.
Travel
Ghent is a beautiful city in Belgium, and is easily accessible by train, car, and plane. We recommend arriving on Thursday, Sept 10 to be ready for the morning sessions on Friday, and leaving on Sunday evening or Monday morning to make the most of your time at ORConf and in Ghent.
Submit a talk
Submissions are open! Presentation proposals are submitted through the Eventbrite registration interface.
ORConf the right venue for talks about anything related to free and open source silicon: EDA tools, IP blocks, logic design and verification, hardware description languages (HDLs), FPGA and ASIC topics, etc. The only requirement: the work must be open source or very strongly related to free and open source silicon.
Talk submissions close on August 16, 2026.
Please make your submissions as early as you can, as the presentation slots are likely to fill up quickly.
We aim to give as many people as possible the opportunity to present their exciting work on free and open source silicon. To accomodate for that we will determine the duration of a full talk once all submissions are in. Historically, full talks ran for 10 minutes (plus time for questions). Lightning talks will be 3 minutes. The exact amount of time you'll get will be communicated closer to the conference.
Code of conduct
We ask all ORConf participants to adhere to the the FOSSi Foundation code of conduct throughout the event.
Let's talk!
Join the #orconf2026:fossi-foundation.org Matrix room! Chat with other participants at the conference, share additional information about the talks, about traveling to and from Ghent, and what else comes to your mind!
Supporters
We thank all our sponsors, exhibitors, and all participants who donated by buying a Pay-what-you-want or Professional Ticket.
We are looking for sponsors. Get in touch if you are interested!
A variety of sponsorship packages are available for this year's ORConf. You'll find all of the details in our sponsorship prospectus.
Schedule
All times are subject to change.
Friday, Sept 11: Conference
Conference during the day. We tend to start around 10am.
Saturday, Sept 12: Conference, lightning talks, and social event
Conference during the day, and a social event in the evening.
Sunday: Unconference and workshops
On Sunday we will have an unconference and workshops to have more time for focused discussions. Even though the exact schedule and topics to talk about will be created together at the event, you can expect in-depth discussions with key stakeholders in Free and Open Source Silicon Projects, demo sessions, hackathrons, and more.
In previous ORConf editions, we had workshops on topics such as RISC-V, open source EDA tools, and more. We are looking forward to seeing what workshops will be proposed for this year's ORConf!
Some workshops are already proposed:
Agile Hardware Design with Chisel (Martin Schoeberl)
Agile Hardware Design with Chisel introduces development of reusable hardware generators. The tutorial is composed of short lectures and hands-on exercises. It is based on a full-semester DTU course and uses Chisel as the implementation language, but the focus is not on Chisel syntax. Participants will learn how to start from a fixed hardware block, refactor it into a configurable generator, test multiple generated instances, and use parameters for design-space exploration. The open-source book Digital Design with Chisel provides supporting background material. The tutorial is aimed at researchers, students, educators, and engineers who want to improve hardware design productivity through agile, generator-based design.