OpenPOWER Foundation and ChipFoundry Announce Winners of the Microwatt Design Challenge, Advancing Open Source POWER Hardware

SAN FRANCISCO — Dec. 18, 2025  — OpenPOWER Foundation, an open developer community for the POWER ISA, today announces the winners of the Microwatt Design Challenge (Microwatt Momentum Hackathon), in collaboration with ChipFoundry. The challenge was open to a broad range of participants including hardware engineers, students, researchers, and developers within the OpenPOWER ecosystem.

The OpenPOWER Foundation, in collaboration with ChipFoundry organized the Microwatt Momentum Hackathon with the intent to accelerate development of the OpenPOWER Microwatt-core with fully open source tooling. More than 300 teams registered for the hackathon, and the majority submitted design proposals. The proposals covered a wide range of possible enhancements and applications for the Microwatt core, ranging from additions and accelerators to improve security, to sensor applications to computational accelerators for AI, various embedded applications at the edge, and tooling enhancements. The hackathon selected 3 winning designs.

• The first winning design comes from Eleftherios Batzolis, an AI hardware researcher at the WESIS Lab, Department Computer Science, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece. The design, titled “MicroWatt-LX SoC Generator,” is an extensible, open source framework for generating parameterizable System-on-Chips based on the Microwatt POWER CPU and LiteX ecosystem.
• The second winning design comes from a team at National Institute of Technology Karnataka, which included Kushal, Aditya A, Adhitya S, IRIS_NITK, Ahan, and Syed Abubakr. The design, titled “Minimal Hardware-Debugger with Microwatt,” is a project that implements an on-chip hardware debugging platform built around the Microwatt SoC.
• The third winning design comes from a team at VIPS-TC, including Dr. Anand Kumar Singh, Sameer Srivastava, Ketan, Shikha, Ira Tyagi. The design, “FPGA Fabric Integration with Microwatt,” this project integrates an FPGA Fabric generated using the OpenFPGA Framework with the Microwatt CPU. 

Designs were chosen by a panel of industry experts, using criteria such as design completeness, prompt documentation (if AI was used), code quality, verification coverage, and design technical merit. The winning designs will be fabricated by ChipFoundry and delivered to their respective design teams in the form of packaged parts and evaluation boards. Other entrants with qualifying designs will receive a free evaluation board.

"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. "Together with ChipFoundry, we established an open design flow designed to accelerate community innovation and facilitate the delivery of novel, impactful open designs. We warmly welcome the three winning submissions into the OpenPOWER ecosystem."

"The Microwatt Design Challenge embodies our core mission: to make cutting-edge innovation in silicon accessible to everyone with a great idea,” said Jeff DiCorpo, chief executive officer of ChipFoundry. “We are thrilled to partner with the OpenPOWER Foundation to not only host this event but to commit to fabricating these three winning designs. 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."

For more detail on the event and the winning designs, please visit chipfoundry.io/challenges/microwatt.

About the OpenPOWER Foundation

The OpenPOWER Foundation is the open steward for the open-source POWER ISA microprocessor architecture. The Foundation has members across software, hardware, and systems developing advanced microprocessors, servers, networking, storage and AI acceleration technology aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next-generation, cloud, edge, and HPC data centers.

About Umbralogic Technologies LLC

Umbralogic Technologies LLC, operating as ChipFoundry, is a technology company focused on providing solutions for the semiconductor industry. Its mission is to make custom silicon chip design and manufacturing accessible to a broader audience, including startups, researchers, and educational institutions, through its chipIgnite platform.

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