Call for Contributions: Workshop on Open Source Design Automation (OSDA) 2019

Held in conjunction with the Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference (DATE). Friday, March 29, 2019; Florence, Italy. Workshop dedicated website (OSDA).

FPGA are increasingly finding themselves in huge data-centers as well as in the hands of hobbyists. However the wide availability of these high and low cost devices contrasts with the narrow ways in which one can access them -- through proprietary closed-source tools and IP -- which can hamper the realisation and deployment of novel FPGA-based applications and EDA innovations. Open-source is a proven and prevalent success when it comes to CPU and GPU silicon, and there are already efforts to drive reconfigurable silicon towards the same trend.

This one-day workshop aims to bring together industrial, academic, and hobbyist actors to explore, disseminate, and network over ongoing efforts for open design automation, with a view to enabling unfettered research and development, improving EDA quality, and lowering the barriers and risks to entry for industry. These aims are particularly poignant due to the recent efforts across the European Union (and beyond) that mandate “open access” for publicly funded research to both published manuscripts as well as any code necessary for reproducing its conclusions.

Topics of interest at OSDA include, but are not limited to:

• Open-source FPGA tools -- the latest developments, breakthroughs, challenges and surveys on the toolflows required to target real silicon parts: synthesis, simulation, place and route, etc.
• Open-source IP for FPGA -- contributions that enrich the IP ecosystem and reduce the need to “re-invent the wheel”, e.g. PCIe and DDR controllers, debug infrastructure, etc.
• Design methodologies provided as open-source -- such as alternative hardware description languages (e.g. derived from Python, Scala), domain specific languages (DSL), high level synthesis (HLS), asynchronous methods, and others.
• Directions on where the open-source FPGA movement should go, current weaknesses in the toolchain, and/or perspectives from industry on how open-source can affect aspects of safety, security, verification, IP protection, time-to-market, datacenter/cloud infrastructure, etc.
• Discussions and case studies on how to license, acquire funding, and commercialise technologies surrounding open-source hardware, which may be different to open software.

Important dates

• Submission deadline: December 17, 2018
• Notification of acceptance: January 14, 2019
• Camera-ready final version: February 11, 2019
• Workshop: March 29, 2019

Submission details and requirements

Prospective authors are invited to submit original contributions (up to six pages), extended abstracts describing work-in-progress or position papers (not exceeding two pages), and demo proposals that would be of general interest. Papers must be submitted as an A4-sized PDF, in the IEEE conference format.

In line with OSDA’s mission, we encourage and will favour submissions that make all artifacts used for experimentation (benchmarks, code, etc.) available for private peer-review. Accepted submissions are required to publish these artifacts under an OSI-approved (preferably permissive) license. The proceedings of this workshop containing all accepted papers will be published on the open-access arXiv repository. Every accepted paper must have at least one author registered to the workshop by January 31.

Organising Team:

• Eddie Hung, University of British Columbia, Canada
• Christian Krieg, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
• Clifford Wolf, Symbiotic EDA, Austria

Programme Committee:

• Andrea Borga, oliscience, Netherlands
• Shane Fleming, Imperial College London, UK
• Hipolito Guzman-Miranda, University of Sevilla, Spain
• Steve Hoover, Redwood EDA, USA
• Dirk Koch, University of Manchester, UK
• Mieszko Lis, University of British Columbia, Canada
• Brent Nelson, Brigham Young University, USA
• Steffen Reith, RheinMain University of Applied Sciences, Germany
• Davide Rossi, University of Bologna, Italy