About ODE4EC

The Open Design Environment for European Chips (ODE4EC) is a coordinated initiative to strengthen Europe's semiconductor ambitions by building and sustaining an open source-focused chip design environment. At its core, ODE4EC believes that a thriving open source ecosystem is essential for Europe to develop genuine, long-term expertise and competitiveness in chip design. By bringing together leading research institutions, universities, and industry partners from across Europe, ODE4EC works to lower the barriers to chip design, grow the talent pool, and ensure that European engineers and researchers have access to world-class open tools and methodologies.

On our roadmap we target the key ingredients of chip design:

• Open Source Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools and design flows lower barriers and help increase productivity
• Open process design kits enable frictionless manufacturing
• Open educational resources widen the funnel of new and upskilled talent

Vision

To increase Europe's impact and share on the global semiconductor markets and Europe's sovereignty, more chips need to be designed in Europe. A major challenge to achieve this goal is the lack of a solid talent pipeline and significant barriers for newcomers such as SMEs and research across disciplines.

Europe cannot rely on closed, proprietary tools and supply chains to build sovereign semiconductor capability. ODE4EC's vision is a chip design landscape where open source is a solid base of chip ambitions: open EDA tools, open design IP, and open process design kits together remove the friction that today keeps talented engineers, researchers, and SMEs from designing chips. When designing a chip is as accessible as writing software, Europe gains a self-reinforcing cycle: more designers, more innovation, more chips.

Ecosystem

Open source chip design is not a single project but an ecosystem. ODE4EC brings together industry, academia, and research organizations that share a commitment to openness, and creates the conditions for them to collaborate effectively. Rather than building in isolation, ODE4EC acts as a connective layer: aligning efforts, closing gaps, and amplifying what the community is already building. The result is an ecosystem that is more than the sum of its parts — one that is resilient, interoperable, and positioned to grow.

Support actions to support the ecosystem are performed as advocacy and through collaborative projects. Activities are performend with strong support by FOSSi Foundation, the leading open source chip design non-profit.

Projects

The first batch of ODE4EC projects will launch in summer 2026:

• ODE4EC-AMS will target open source EDA tools for analog and mixed signal designs
• ODE4EC-DIG will target open source EDA tools for digital designs
• ODE4EC-PIV will target open source tools for productivity of chip design, integration into flows and verification of chip designs

Leadership

General activities and the overall coordination are led by:

• Frank Gürkaynak - ETH Zürich, Switzerland
• Luca Benini - University Bologna, Italy, and ETH Zürich, Switzerland
• Stefan Wallentowitz - HM University of Applied Sciences Munich, Germany, and FOSSi Foundation, United Kingdom

The leadership team is completed with the leaders of projects in the ODE4EC projects

• Rene Scholz - IHP, Germany (ODE4EC-AMS coordinator)
• Christian Pilato - Politecnico Milano, Italy (ODE4EC-DIG coordinator)
• Luis Miguel Pinho - INESC TEC, Portugal (ODE4EC-PIV coordinator)