Updating the community at ORConf, Ghent, Belgium
Matt gave the latest Tiny Tapeout update at ORConf in Ghent. Chips in space, new tools, and plans for thousands more projects.
Tiny Tapeout Team
•18 September 2026
OrConf 2026
Tiny Tapeout was at the ORConf 2026 last week, from September 11-13. Matt Venn gave a talk updating the community about the latest news and our plans for the future.
🏆 Our Recent Wins
Matt started his update by sharing the exciting news of us launching chips into space! Everyone with a design on TT06 got to run it in low orbit. Matt’s ring oscillator showed temperature fluctuations as the satellite rotated in and out of the sun’s shadow. That’s real silicon doing real work 400km up!
Another cool thing we did was a chip surgery with a FIB machine — cutting and rejoining microscopic wires inside actual silicon.
Matt then shared Tiny Tapeout’s recognition at the European Open Source Award from David Guatiellis, one of the Arduino founders
New Tiny Tapeout Explorer
And finally, Matt talked about our RISC-V competition, which was a huge success, pulling in 44 entries. It was the biggest Tiny Tapeout design so far at 60,000 standard cells! There were a lot of interesting and crazy projects in it, one of which won the award ‘most unusual’. The DWARF Line Table Accelerator by Laurie Hedge.
📈 Tools and Growth
The Tiny Tapeout community is growing! The latest community stats have been very exciting and also heartwarming to see. 5,000 members on Discord. 4,000 projects manufactured to date, and 24 chips completed! We are on track for 3,000 projects this year across 10 shuttles. Next year we’re expecting 4,000 projects across 17 shuttles.
One notable contribution from our community is the new 3D viewer, Tiny Tapeout Explorer. It doesn’t just show your design in 3D, but it also extracts the netlist and simulates it running in the browser. So you can see your chip working before it even gets manufactured. Pretty neat!
New Tiny Tapeout Explorer
⏭️ What’s Coming
The Tiny Tapeout GOAT! Which we’ve officially changed to BOAT (best of all time).
We’re ordering 1,000 designs from wafer.space and making a curated chip of the best Tiny Tapeout projects. This includes Mini Mosbius (an analog FPGA for learning analog microelectronics), a tiny FPGA from Leo and the Fabulous team, and all the winners of the different competitions we’ve had.
Tiny Tapeout Greatest of All Time
🙏 A BIG Thank You
None of this would be possible without our sponsors: SwissChips, Tillitis, Texplained, ChipFoundry, Wafer Space, and IHP. Matt made sure to give them a shout out. And to, of course, everyone showing support, submitting designs, and building this community.
You check out Matt’s talk here.
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Last modified by Matt Venn on 3 October 2026. Commit 3b70330. Suggestions?