Also, in the git repo for the submission, which branch should be used for the user project? I'm currently working on a branch off of develop.

Ideally we would have the Caravel chip all finished and there would only be the "release" branch. However, we're still debugging a few issues that are showing up in the gate-level simulations, and fixing some routing and DRC errors, so there are still a lot of commits being made to the "develop" branch. Ostensibly, both versions should look the same from the standpoint of the end user, but it would not surprise me at all to find that that's not true.

Sure, but I meant for the final cut. I would merge my stuff into my repo's release branch?