The free and open source silicon community, both established and simply interested, is invited to a new event this weekend: the OpenTapeOut Conference 2021, hosted by Zero to ASIC course creator Matt Venn.

“We encourage all of you folks to join us at what we hope will be the start of a revolution! No matter who you are or where you are from, don’t care what you did, as long as you love ASICs [Application Specific Integrated Circuits] and electronics in general,” the event’s organisers explain. “We don’t expect you to have any serious pre-knowledge in ASIC design. Actually we’d love to have you as a guest, especially if you are thinking about starting a new career in ASICs or FPGAs.”

The two-day virtual conference, which will be streamed live, opens on Saturday the 6th of November with a keynote speech from Tim “mithro” Ansell before launching into presentations on topics including the latest from the DARPA OpenROAD project, a look at fault injection, programmable waveform analysis, and Joe FitzPatrick on “101 ways to flip your bits and a 100 ways to prevent it.”

The event’s second day includes efabless’ Mohamed Kassem discussing the process of making open-source chips work, then covers everything from talking to satellites with open silicon to analogue integrated circuit design for the 21st century.

The event is free, with registration available on the OpenTapeOut website now.