TTSKY26a demoscene competition is live!

Meet the judges, see the prizes, and learn how to enter. Real lithography masks, silicon wafers, and more!

Tiny Tapeout Team

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16 April 2026

Demoscene TTSKY26a

Demoscene TTSKY26a

Demoscene is back! We saw some incredible entries in the last competition and we’re looking forward to seeing people push the barriers even further in the silicon demoscene arena.

What’s Different This Year

With 3 different size categories, a new FLASH category, and a newcomer track, there’s something for everyone! Whether you’re a demoscene veteran or designing your first ASIC, there’s a place for you!

Meet the Judges

We have three hardware legends judging this year.

Jeri Ellsworth

A self-taught chip designer and inventor, Jeri is legendary in the hardware community for squeezing entire systems onto single chips, including a complete Commodore 64 inside a joystick. She pioneered DIY semiconductor fabrication, becoming the first person to demonstrate building a transistor using household items.

Will Green

Will runs Project F, an FPGA and hardware education site covering graphics pipelines, VGA timing, framebuffers, and RISC-V. His tutorials have helped countless people bridge the gap from software to FPGAs — making him perfect for judging designs that push display hardware to its limits.

Jeroen Domburg (Sprite)

A legendary hacker with a gift for making hardware do things it was never meant to. Sprite has ported Doom to a Rigol scope, built a Vectrex multi cart, and created the Hackaday FPGA badge - all with the kind of deranged ingenuity that makes him a natural judge for our ASIC demoscene competition.

The Prizes

The prizes are real. Not digital certificates, real hardware.

Every entrant who purchases the demoboard gets free VGA, Audio, and QSPI Pmods.

Winners of each category receive combinations of:

  • Real lithography masks — The physical photomasks used to create the chips
  • Silicon wafers — Actual wafers from the foundry
  • Matt’s first ASIC die mounted in an epoxy cube — Numbered and signed. A unique collector’s piece from the history of Tiny Tapeout
  • ASIC baseball caps — Wear your silicon pride
  • Free tiles for future tapeouts — Keep designing and manufacturing
  • Previous TT chips — Silicon from earlier runs

Learn more about the competition here.

⚠️Update! Competition is closed. Check out the final entries here.

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Last modified by Matt Venn on 31 July 2026. Commit 8a58a7f. Suggestions?