We are a group of developers and open hardware enthusiasts from the OpenRISC community, that formed the FOSSi Foundation. It is a non-profit foundation with the mission to promote and assist free and open digital hardware designs and their related ecosystems. The FOSSi Foundation operates as an open, inclusive, vendor-independent community.

While our work originates from the OpenRISC processor, most of the development went into the processor ecosystem, like the toolchain, operating systems or userspace software. Beside that "uncore" hardware components are important to build a System-on-Chip. The focus of the FOSSi Foundation is therefore not on a single processor core, but we work on advancing the entire Free and Open Source Silicon (FOSSi) community. Our main ambition goes into building a community hub: LibreCores.org. We currently bring it forward to become the main resource to find open source hardware components and publish such components and their ecosystem.

Beside single components and entire SoCs, we see open source Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools as a crucial for the advance of FOSSi. We therefore encourage and support open source synthesis tools, simulators and system generators, just to mention a few.

With those activities we are steadily working on advancing FOSSi and make it the next success after Open Source Software and (tangible) Open Source Hardware. We are open to proposals that help us getting in the direction of "open source chips". Please find a list of a few ideas, and we highly encourage you to think beyond that.

Google Summer of Code students are invited to present and demonstrate their projects at our annual conference with 100-200 attendants, which is held in Bologna, Italy, on October 7-9.