The OpenPOWER Foundation and ChipFoundry jointly hosted the Microwatt Momentum hackathon to foster development of the open-source Microwatt processor core. More than 300 teams participated, submitting proposals spanning security enhancements, edge computing applications, AI accelerators, and tooling improvements.
Three designs were selected as winners based on design completeness, documentation quality, code standards, verification coverage, and technical merit.
Winning Designs
1. MicroWatt-LX SoC Generator — Eleftherios Batzolis
An extensible, open-source framework for generating parameterizable SoCs based on the Microwatt POWER CPU and the LiteX ecosystem. The generator allows developers to configure memory interfaces, peripheral sets, and I/O options while keeping the POWER ISA control core at the center of the design.
2. Minimal Hardware-Debugger with Microwatt — National Institute of Technology Karnataka
An on-chip debugging platform built around the Microwatt SoC, providing hardware-assisted debugging capabilities for open POWER ISA designs. The project addresses a practical gap in the open hardware toolchain by making POWER-based systems easier to develop and debug at the hardware level.
3. FPGA Fabric Integration with Microwatt — VIPS-TC
A design that combines an OpenFPGA Framework-generated FPGA fabric with the Microwatt CPU, creating a flexible POWER ISA compute platform with reconfigurable logic tightly integrated alongside the processor core.
What Happens Next
ChipFoundry will fabricate the winning designs and deliver packaged components and evaluation boards to each winning team. This represents a complete path from open-source RTL to physical silicon — demonstrating that community-developed POWER ISA processors can reach real hardware without proprietary toolchains or closed foundry relationships.
James Kulina, Executive Director of the OpenPOWER Foundation, praised the submissions as evidence of "comprehensive, high-performance open-source tools" enabling community innovation at the chip level.
About Microwatt
Microwatt is an open-source POWER ISA 3.0 soft CPU core originally developed in VHDL. It has been taped out as a real ASIC using the OpenROAD open-source EDA flow on the SkyWater 130nm PDK, and runs Linux on FPGA today. Microwatt serves as the control cluster in the OpenPOWER Foundation's OpenAIU inference accelerator project and as the processor core in LibreBMC.