SSCS PICO Chronicles: The Open Source Community is Growing Further and Supported by SSCS PICO [Society News]

The previous year was another great success for the open source integrated circuit (IC) design ecosystem. It finished with two actions: the second IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) PICO open source IC design contest, known as
the Chipathon
, and the first Code-a-Chip travel grant award. The second Chipathon installment in 2022 attracted 55 teams across the globe, out of which volunteers selected 22 outstanding proposals. The finishing line was reached by 14 teams at the end of November (see the summaries in
Figure 1
and
Table 1
), after months of global joint action, including weekly technical checkup meetings and conversations on the bustling IEEE-SSCS-DC-22 Slack channel.