OPF Microwatt Winners

content/blog/OPF-announces-winners-microwatt-hackathon.md

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+---
+title: "OPF Announces Winners of Microwatt CPU Hackathon"
+date: "2025-12-09"
+categories: 
+  - "blogs"
+tags: 
+  - "openpower"
+  - "ibm"
+  - "power"
+  - "openpower-foundation"
+  - "open-source"
+  - "ai"
+  - "open-hardware"
+  - "developer-community"
+  - "isa"
+  - "power-processor-core"
+  - "hackathon"
+---
+
+**By [OPF,](https://openpowerfoundation.org)**
+
+The OpenPOWER Foundation is pleased to announce the winners of the [Microwatt Design Challenge](https://chipfoundry.io/challenges/microwatt), in collaboration with [ChipFoundry](https://chipfoundry.io/). 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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/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”](https://github.com/Lefteris-B/microwatt_design_challenge), is an extensible, open-source framework for generating parameterizable SoCs based on the Microwatt POWER CPU and LiteX ecosystem.
+The second winning design comes from a team at [National Institute of Technology Karnataka](https://www.linkedin.com/school/nitk-surathkal/), which included [Kushal](http://www.linkedin.com/in/kushalcr), [Aditya A](https://www.linkedin.com/in/adithya-a-b48131301/), [Adhitya S](https://www.linkedin.com/in/adhitya-santhanam-7a34aa28a?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=android_app), [IRIS_NITK](https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/all/?heroEntityKey=urn%3Ali%3Aorganization%3A14416972&keywords=IRIS%2C%20NITK&origin=ENTITY_SEARCH_HOME_HISTORY&sid=QDH), [Ahan](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahan-p-shetty-329620258/), [Syed Abubakr](https://www.linkedin.com/in/syed-abubaker-bin-junaid-83526b23a/). The design titled [“Minimal Hardware-Debugger with Microwatt”](https://github.com/blue67chillout/Microwatt-Based-MInimalx-Debugger.git), 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](https://www.linkedin.com/company/vipsengineering/), including [Dr. Anand Kumar Singh](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-anand-kumar-singh-2ab988179), [Sameer Srivastava](https://www.linkedin.com/in/s-m33r/), [Ketan](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ketan-2204a4344/), [Shikha](https://www.linkedin.com/in/shikha-520bb9322), [Ira Tyagi](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ira-tyagi-2b4a3333b/).  The design, [“FPGA Fabric Integration with Microwatt”](https://github.com/s-m33r/chipfoundry_fpga_test), 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 Microwatt Design Challenge submissions are a testament to the comprehensive, high-performance open-source tools now at the community's fingertips for the OpenPOWER ISA and Microwatt Core," said [James Kulina](https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-kulina/), Executive Director, OpenPOWER Foundation. "In collaboration with ChipFoundry, we've created an open design flow that will allow our community to innovate at high velocity and deliver novel and impactful open designs. We are absolutely thrilled to welcome these three winning designs into the OpenPOWER ecosystem."
+
+For more detail on the event and the winning designs, please visit the [Microwatt Hackathon webpage](chipfoundry.io/challenges/microwatt).
+
+