Reuse You Can Check: Our Talk at ORConf 2026

September 26, 2026 • By Shivaram Mysore

Earlier this month I presented at ORConf 2026, the FOSSi Foundation's open silicon conference in Ghent, Belgium.

The talk asked one question: what would it take for an enterprise to bring open-source silicon tools and methods into its production workflow?

Open silicon has answered can we make this available? remarkably well. An enterprise asks different questions. Can my engineers use it without first becoming EDA specialists? Can my team standardise it, automate it, maintain it and put it into production? Can we check the result independently before we depend on it?

Software answered those questions a long time ago. You find a package, read its manifest, install it and run its tests. Silicon reuse still means a tarball and a PDF, and the PDF is the contract. That is hard to build a production process on.

The talk walks through two open answers:

  • Vyges VyCatalog™: a machine-readable IP registry. You can search before you clone, see licence and maturity up front, and get dependencies declared rather than discovered.
  • Vyges Loom™: open sign-off engines that give a second opinion alongside the tools you already use, not a replacement for them. Each engine runs standalone and exits non-zero on a violation, so it can gate a CI pipeline. Among the evidence: a floorplan that matches the DEF our Edge Sensor SoC was fabricated from, row for row and track for track.

It also covers what none of this solves. Metadata is not correctness, and sign-off is not functional verification.

Key takeaways

  • Enterprises adopt infrastructure, not code. Open silicon has plenty of code. What it needs to get into production is something a team can standardise, automate and maintain.
  • An IP block is more than its RTL. Its interface, files, dependencies and PDK targets should be machine-readable and extracted from the RTL, so a build system, not a person reading a PDF, can decide whether it fits.
  • The PDK should be a declared dependency. A flow should ask for its collateral, so moving between an open PDK and a proprietary one is a configuration change rather than an infrastructure project.
  • Independent checks build trust. A second sign-off opinion, compared against another implementation and against fabricated silicon, earns more confidence than any single tool. It also means adopting open tools never requires throwing out the ones you already trust.
  • Open source is a means, not the product. Not everything needs to be open. The contracts, the checks and the way the pieces fit together do, because those are what an enterprise has to inspect before it commits.

It is ten minutes. Watch it here:

Watch the talk · Read the slides · ORConf 2026 program · Get in touch