embedded world Conference 2026: Taping-out Open-Source Hardware and the Reproducibility Gap

Open-source hardware projects, and especially RISC-V, have lowered the entry barrier and time-to-market for research groups and companies in the semiconductor industry. However, to effectively bring their designs into silicon, a lot of practical know-how and technical resources are needed to bridge the gap between design and physical implementation, the gap from RTL code to tape-out. Open-source projects are only as good as the developer's ability to set them up and reproduce their results. One of Fraunhofer's guiding principles is to be the bridge between applied research and industry, transforming original ideas into innovations. We have worked closely with academic and industry partners for many years and have closely followed the evolution of the open-source hardware community.

In this presentation, we share our own findings and insights, based on hands-on experience with these technologies. We present our latest tape-out experience with the OpenTitan project. This architecture, steered by lowRISC, has many characteristics of a great project and advertises successful tape-outs. However, it still presents many challenges for engineers and designers that make it hard to use in actual tape-outs.

We will showcase our latest experience in taping-out a Secure Element chip based on the OpenTitan project. We present some of the problems we encountered with our design, as well as our conclusions, and the issues we believe are still present in the open-source silicon community.

About the Speaker Dr. Augusto Hoppe, Fraunhofer IIS

Dr. Augusto Hoppe completed his joint doctorate on hardware-based techniques for processor fault tolerance and control-flow protection in 2021 from KIT (Germany) and UFRGS (Brazil). Since then, he has been leading tape-outs and hardware development at Fraunhofer IIS' Integrated Digital Systems department. His research and work focus on safety and security architectures. While at Fraunhofer he has been working with the implementation and development of security systems based on open-source projects such as the OpenTitan and PULP.