OpenPOWER Foundation and ChipFoundry have turned open source silicon into real, fabricated hardware, announcing Microwatt Design Challenge winners who will receive packaged chips and evaluation boards, showcasing a complete open design-to-fabrication pipeline.
The OpenPOWER Foundation and ChipFoundry have announced the winners of the Microwatt Design Challenge (Microwatt Momentum Hackathon), marking a significant step in advancing fully open-source POWER hardware from design to real silicon fabrication. The announcement was made on December 18, 2025, in San Francisco, and distributed via PRNewswire.
Jointly organised by the OpenPOWER Foundation and ChipFoundry, the hackathon was designed to accelerate development of the OpenPOWER Microwatt core using a completely open-source tooling and design flow. More than 300 teams registered for the challenge, with participants spanning hardware engineers, students, researchers, and developers across the OpenPOWER ecosystem.
Submissions covered a broad spectrum of use cases, including security accelerators, sensor-based systems, AI and computational accelerators, embedded and edge applications, and tooling enhancements. Following evaluation by a panel of industry experts, three winning designs were selected based on design completeness, documentation quality, code quality, verification coverage, and technical merit.
The first winning design, MicroWatt-LX SoC Generator, was submitted by Eleftherios Batzolis, an AI hardware researcher at the WESIS Lab, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece. The second, Minimal Hardware-Debugger with Microwatt, was developed by a team from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka. The third, FPGA Fabric Integration with Microwatt, came from a team at VIPS-TC.
“The outstanding design submissions serve as validation for the comprehensive, high-performance open source toolchain available for the OpenPOWER ISA and Microwatt Core,” said James Kulina, Executive Director of the OpenPOWER Foundation.
ChipFoundry will fabricate all three winning designs and deliver packaged silicon parts and evaluation boards to the teams, while other qualifying entrants will receive free evaluation boards. As Jeff DiCorpo, Chief Executive Officer of ChipFoundry, noted, “Delivering packaged parts and evaluation boards to the winners validates the power of the open source flow and underscores our dedication to accelerating the next generation of open hardware developers.”
