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OpenPOWER Foundation and ChipFoundry Announce Microwatt Design Challenge Winners

On December 18, 2025, the OpenPOWER Foundation, a collaborative community focused on the open development of the POWER instruction set architecture (ISA), partnered with ChipFoundry to announce the winners of the Microwatt Design Challenge, also known as the Microwatt Momentum Hackathon. This event attracted a diverse array of participants, including hardware engineers, students, researchers, and developers eager to contribute to the OpenPOWER ecosystem.

The Microwatt Momentum Hackathon aimed to foster the exploration and development of the OpenPOWER Microwatt core, utilizing fully open-source tools. With over 300 teams registering for the event, the submissions offered a wide variety of proposals. These ranged from enhancements to improve security, applications for sensors and computational accelerators in AI, to various embedded applications at the edge, and improvements in tooling.

After careful consideration, three designs were selected as winners by a panel of industry experts. The criteria for selection included the completeness of the design, clarity of documentation, quality of code, verification coverage, and overall technical merit.

Winning Designs

• - First Place: The winning entry came from Eleftherios Batzolis, an AI hardware researcher from the WESIS Lab at Democritus University of Thrace, Greece. His project, titled MicroWatt-LX SoC Generator, is an extensible, open-source framework designed for creating parameterizable System-on-Chips based on the Microwatt POWER CPU.

• - Second Place: A team from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, including participants Kushal, Aditya A, Adhitya S, IRIS_NITK, Ahan, and Syed Abubakr, presented the design Minimal Hardware-Debugger with Microwatt. This project focuses on implementing an innovative on-chip hardware debugging platform centered around the Microwatt SoC.

• - Third Place: The final winning design was crafted by a team from VIPS-TC, which included Dr. Anand Kumar Singh, Sameer Srivastava, Ketan, Shikha, and Ira Tyagi. Their project, named FPGA Fabric Integration with Microwatt, integrates an FPGA Fabric generated via the OpenFPGA Framework with the Microwatt CPU.

Each of the winning designs will be fabricated by ChipFoundry, which will provide the respective design teams with packaged parts and evaluation boards for further development. Teams who submitted qualifying designs but did not win will also receive a complimentary evaluation board.

James Kulina, Executive Director of the OpenPOWER Foundation, commented, "The exceptional quality of the design submissions reinforces the robust and high-performance open-source toolchain available for the OpenPOWER ISA and Microwatt Core. By collaborating with ChipFoundry, we’ve fostered a design flow that promotes community innovation and facilitates the introduction of groundbreaking open designs. We are excited to welcome the three winning designs into the OpenPOWER ecosystem."

Jeff DiCorpo, CEO of ChipFoundry, added, "The Microwatt Design Challenge truly embodies our mission to facilitate access to cutting-edge silicon innovation for everyone. We are proud to collaborate with the OpenPOWER Foundation for this event and are committed to fabricating these winning designs, validating the effectiveness of our open-source development approach."

For more information about the Microwatt Design Challenge and insights into the winning designs, you can visit ChipFoundry's website.

About OpenPOWER Foundation

The OpenPOWER Foundation serves as the overseer of the open-source POWER ISA microprocessor architecture. With a diverse membership encompassing software, hardware, and system developers, the foundation aims to create advanced microprocessors, servers, networks, storage, and AI acceleration technologies that promote greater choice and flexibility for next-generation data centers.

About ChipFoundry

Operating under Umbralogic Technologies LLC, ChipFoundry is dedicated to making custom silicon chip design and manufacturing more accessible. Through its chipIgnite platform, ChipFoundry aims to empower a wider audience, including startups, researchers, and educational institutions therewith increasing innovation capability across the semiconductor industry.