<!channel>: A big "Thank you!" to everyone who submitted proposals for Chipalooza. We received 42 proposals from a broad and diverse swath of the analog design community, with experience ranging from the college undergraduate to the seasoned professional, and from a dozen different countries. This meets or exceeds every expectation we had for the challenge participation. Per the schedule, an announcement about proposal acceptances will be made on Tuesday, March 5. Following the announcement, there will be a workshop on schematics and simulation on March 7, and attendance is open and not restricted to challenge participants. I will post a link to the workshop webinar here, when it is available.

Will all workshops be open or just the first? @Tim Edwards

A supplemental reference manual pointing to the most authoritative versions of design tools, PDKs, models, and layout extraction procedures (all of them probably moving targets, more or less) would be helpful … for crazy folks who want to do the design flow backwards. Written reference material, uniquely labeled as more than opinion, is better than videos, and both are way better than stackoverflow like forums (where facts get drowned in opinions).

@Aya Khaled: All workshops will be open to anyone who wants to join.

@Tim Edwards, if I recall correctly, last time I seriously tried to work with the efabless design suite, I started out with your installation instructions, which almost worked, then followed someone else's recommendations that involved abominations like docker, so I had most of the files (at least) twice and almost no room on my hard drive any more, and in the end, neither of the installations worked because of subtle incompatibilities, which boil down to a handful of undocumented (and mostly unnecessary) configuration options in xschemrc files and such. I would very much like to avoid having to deal with such incompatibilities, in particular I would like to avoid having the people who give seminars to preach to the choir about an analog design flow, IFF the design tools are stable, consistently answer: "This setup #worksforme, and I have more important things to do than answer such low-level questions". This "I don't have time for this" argument is the only reason why I haven't touched your design suite for the last 2+ years, even though I had nothing more important to do and literally all the time in the world. Anyhow, I'm going to try and restore a working environment that covers at least what you want to talk about on March 7th, so I don't get stuck in undocumented configuration incompatibilities, which 1. prevent me from following the seminar on my setup in real time 2. turn something that should be fun into something utterly disgusting (i.e., dealing with characteristic software engineering sloppiness) I'll keep you posted …

Is the proposal acceptance announcement still releasing today?

@Zach May: Yes, as soon as I can get it put together.