CHIPS Alliance 2025- A Year of Breakthroughs in Open Silicon and the Road Ahead

Author: Rob Mains, Executive Director of CHIPS Alliance

CHIPS Alliance is a six-year-old organization that is part of the Linux Foundation, whose mission is to foster collaborative, open source development in the silicon hardware design ecosystem. CHIPS champions all aspects of hardware development including:

• Chip design architecture
• Electronic design automation for design entry, design verification, and physical implementation
• FPGA tools
• Repository of chip designs and verification design benches
• Firmware

Artificial intelligence and chip design

As is well known, artificial intelligence has become a productive reality for many. What is emerging is the potential of artificial intelligence for augmenting and accelerating chip design. This includes understanding the effectiveness of design verification to exploring a given chip process technology design space optimization. This was exemplified in part at the MLCAD Symposium held in Santa Cruz, CA this past September.

Beyond this, the growth of LLMs and agentic-based multi-model systems is expanding into automating the complexity of chip EDA design systems. CHIPS Alliance is working with academia and the open source community in this space and hopes to initiate projects in this overall area in 2026.

Adoption of Open Source Hardware

The Caliptra program has demonstrated the potential of collaborative development, both in terms of reducing time to market and bringing the best minds to bear on the problem. Caliptra is seeing widespread adoption in many device types, including SoC’s for cloud computing, memory, and storage devices.

The CHIPS repository offers a number of hardware building blocks, which, aside from Caliptra, also include the RISC-V VeeR core family, which has also been integrated into Caliptra.

Open Source EDA

We continue to see active interest and development of open source EDA, which offers a flexible, customizable alternative to commercial EDA solutions. Much of this effort focuses on front-end design with languages such as CHISEL, SystemC, or System Verilog. Tools such as Verible, SV-tests, and UHDM aid in rounding out front-end language support. This also includes work in the design verification space, such as exhibited by RISCV-DV.

Major Technical Milestones

• Key project releases and advancements
  • Caliptra
    • 2.1 RTL released
    • Post Quantum readiness
    • Caliptra Supplemental Fund facilitating joint investment
    • OpenPRoT Collaborative Security Firmware for Caliptra Announced and Initiated

This year, CHIPS has matured a number of projects to the graduated status, which makes them official Linux Foundation / CHIPS Alliance projects. These include:

• Caliptra Workgroup
• Chisel
• OpenPRoT
• VeeR

CHIPS also has a number of projects that are in the process of completing the required steps to become Graduated. These include:

• Blackwire
• OpenFASOC
• F4PGA
• SVTools

Community Growth and Ecosystem Impact

CHIPS continued to see interest and growth in collaborative hardware and software. We were fortunate to have the following companies and universities join CHIPS this year. They include:

• Microchip
• CISCO
• Synopsys
• Rambus
• Innogrit
• Purdue

We continue to seek companies and universities interested in learning more about and participating in open hardware development.

Highlights from events and workshops

CHIPS participated in four industry events this year, two hosted by the Open Compute Project, the Design Automation Conference, and the Open Source EDA Birds of a Feather event.

CHIP had booths at the OCP events, with Caliptra emulation demonstration hardware provide by AMI at the EU event. Microsoft provided Caliptra demonstration hardware at its booth at OCP in San Jose for the North America event. Both OCP events were well attended, with nearly 11000 attendees at the NA event. Caliptra was prominently mentioned in numerous keynotes at both events, which helped to drive booth visitation.

For the Design Automation Conference, CHIPS hosted an engineering track talk session entitled “The Continuing Evolution of Open Hardware Development”, with three great talks:

• Open source tooling for RTL register description/software/testbench generation and IP aggregation
• Chip Physical Implementation using Open Source EDA
• Collaborative Chip Design: Making Silicon More Secure through Open Collaborative Design. Caliptra: A silicon root of trust

We had great attendance at the event, where the audience learned about advances in the open hardware development ecosystem.

CHIPS provided in part sponsorship for the well-attended Open Source EDA Birds of a Feather event that had around 200 enthuasists attending to hear multiple talks on advances in open source EDA and silicon. This event has grown significantly over the past few years, and next year will look to have a large venue and schedule to accommodate the numerous participants in both the program and audience.

2025-2026 CHIPS Leadership Transition

At the end of March 2026, after more than five years of leading CHIPS Alliance and more than 40 years in the tech industry, I will be retiring from the Linux Foundation and the industry. Matt Cockrell, Chair of the CHIPS Alliance Governing Board, will be leading the project until a replacement candidate is identified.

We look forward to the continuing and new directions that CHIPS takes under Matt’s leadership in conjunction with the open source hardware community.