Latch-Up is now behind us and we can reflect on what a great conference it was. For the first time, Latch-Up was held in Canada, making it properly a North American event. This was clearly greatly appreciated by the Canadians, who made up more than 60 percent of the conference registrations. Of course we had the usual contingent of participants from the U.S., as well as some die-hards from Europe who are not content to just attend ORConf in the fall. We had 138 registrations, and given how packed the conference room was for both days, it's clear that most people who registered showed up for the event.
The conference was held at the University of Waterloo, which has Canada's largest university engineering program, located about 100 km west of Toronto. It was a pretty quiet time at the university, which was on break between the spring and summer quarters. The temperature was a bit nippy for May, even in Ontario, but otherwise the weather was reasonably good for a conference. Notwithstanding that a few flakes of snow fell on us while we were taking the group photo Saturday afternoon!
We started off the conference on Friday with a morning tour of the University of Waterloo Nanofabrication Lab, giving those participants who don't deal day-to-day with silicon and foundries a look behind the scenes at the machinery that makes it all happen. The tour was popular and we filled up two groups.
Talks were spread pretty evenly over a number of topics, and we grouped talks into sessions on SoCs, education and community, EDA tools, FPGAs, RISC-V, analog and mixed-signal, foundries and services, artificial intelligence, and HDLs. Unsurprisingly, AI mentions crept into a number of talks this year. We got updates from a number of regular attendees such as Hudson River Trading (Verilator), AntMicro, IHP foundry, Chip Foundry, CHIPS Alliance, GDSFactory, and OpenROAD. The talk voted "best presentation" for Latch-Up 2026 was the one by Alex Singer (U. Toronto) on Open Source FPGAs. All of the talks have been uploaded to YouTube.
Saturday evening's dinner was accompanied by a round of "Lightning Talks", as has become traditional at the FOSSi Foundation conferences. As previously done, talks were limited to two minutes each, enforced by having the audience drown out the speaker with applause when the time was up. The two favorite talks, verging on silliness, were on "System Verilog clown emoji" by Frans Skarman and "How to Draw Owls" by Olof Kindgren. These (and all of the other lightning talks) are on YouTube if you're curious (and if Olof's talk hasn't been censored). Apart from Frans and Olof (who are FOSSi Foundation core team members), the "best lightning talk" award (by audience survey) was a tie between Matthew Ballance ("Verification Coverage with PyUCIS") and Omar El-Sawy ("Be a Monkey: Sizing and Layout").
The Sunday "unconference" was dominated by the Tiny Tapeout workshop, run by Pat Deegan (the Canadian division of Tiny Tapeout), trying out a new Verilog-based workshop instead of the usual Wokwi schematic-based workshop. The workshop was underwritten by Chip Foundry, who provided vouchers so that all participants (there were around 25 or so) could get their sample designs on silicon.
A big thank you to all the people who helped support the event and make it happen smoothly! Our on-site coordinator was John Long, a professor in the EE department, who we kept busy handling catering, picking up deliveries, and putting up signage; and a cohort of University of Waterloo students who volunteered to stay through their break and help out with registration and anything else that needed doing. Frans Skarman lugged all the A/V equipment and cables from Europe and back again, and handled most of the recording for the event. Olof Kindgren did most of the session moderating, and Tim Edwards filled in where needed. Philipp Wagner kept things running smoothly from afar. Andrew Back handled finances and deflected misdirected emails about catering choices. (Inserted by the editor:) And Tim Edwareds did an amazing job of co-organizing a conference for the first time, including putting together the schedule and recruiting speakers. Thanks Tim!
Also a big thank you to our sponsors, who will always be found on the conference website, and for all those participants who either paid for a professional ticket or chose to donate to the event with the "pay what you want" option. The event, as always, is free to attend, so those who contributed helped make it possible for students and non-professionals to get to the conference. It was especially nice to meet students from all over Canada, including groups from Waterloo and Toronto, of course, but also a large contingent of chip-making enthusiasts from Calgary. I was thanked numerous times by University of Waterloo students who were thrilled to have an event like this at their university.
Finally, don't forget that ORConf, the European counterpart to Latch-Up, is around the corner in September in Ghent, Belgium; and we will likely repeat the highly successful DownUnderflow in Australia before returning once again to North America for Latch-Up 2027.