Oct 30, 2017

FOSDEM 2018 CAD and Open Hardware Devroom Call for Participation


This is the call for participation in the FOSDEM 2018 devroom on Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools and Open Hardware, to be held on Saturday 3 February 2018 in Brussels, Belgium. We are looking for contributions under the form of talks and tutorials covering the following main topics:
  • Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design tools (e.g. KiCad and gEDA)
  • Analogue and digital simulators (e.g. ngspice, Qucs, Gnucap, Xyce,GHDL, Icarus and Verilator)
  • Any other EDA tools such as high-level tools for digital hardware design (e.g. Migen) and HDL synthesis tools (e.g. Yosys)
  • Field solvers such as openEMS
  • Mechanical 2D and 3D CAD tools such as LibreCAD, FreeCAD, OpenSCAD andSolveSpace
  • Open Hardware projects such as the Teres laptop and the lowRISC SoC
  • Inter-project opportunities for collaboration
We hope to provide an opportunity for attendees to bring themselves up to date on the latest FOSS CAD and Open Hardware developments, share knowledge and identify opportunities to collaborate on development tasks. This devroom is an evolution of the EDA devroom we organised in 2015, 2016 and 2017.

The submission process: Please submit your proposals at

If you already have a Pentabarf account (for example as a result of having submitted a proposal in the past), make sure you use it to log in and submit your proposal. Do not create a new account if you already have one. Please provide a bit of information about yourself under Person -> Description -> Abstract. When you submit your proposal (creating an "Event" in Pentabarf), make sure you choose the "CAD and Open Hardware Devroom" in the track drop-down menu. Otherwise your proposal might go unnoticed. Fill in at least a title and abstract for the proposed talk and a suggested duration. Bear in mind that a lot of the value in these meetings comes from the discussions, so please be reasonable regarding the duration of the talk.

Important dates
  • 1 December 2017: deadline for submission of proposals
  • 8 December 2017: announcement of final schedule
  • 3 February 2018: devroom day
Recordings: The FOSDEM organisers hope to be able to live-stream and record all the talks. The recordings will be published under the same licence as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY). Only presentations will be recorded, not informal discussions and whatever happens during the lunch break. By agreeing to present at FOSDEM, you automatically give permission to be recorded. The organisers will agree to make exceptions but only for exceptional and well-reasoned cases.

Mailing list: Feel free to subscribe to the mailing list of the CAD and Open Hardware devroom to submit ideas, ask questions and generally discuss about the event:

Spread the word!

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