My last post was announcing the Innovation Awards Contest, now after a few months we announced our winners last week. Many great entries were submitted, our panel of judges reviewed them all and picked the winners. There is great things happening in the community and here we see entries from academia and from industry. We thank everyone for participating and for the effort and contributions made. Sun awarded $135,000 to the OpenSPARC Community Innovation Awards Contest winners. We look forward to next year and hope to see many more contributions.

The winners of the OpenSPARC Community Innovation Awards Contest designed to fuel innovation around chip technology. The contest was part of Sun's Open Source Community Innovation Awards Program, a multi-year program running across several open source communities with a $1 Million total prize.

The OpenSPARC Contest Award categories and winners include the following:

• Grand Prize - Martin Johansson, Jiri Gaisler of Gaisler Research
• Best University Level Computer Architecture and/or VLSI course - Mark McDermott, Professor at the University of Texas, Austin
• Best New Bus Interface Creation as a contribution to the OpenSPARC community - Martin Johansson, Jiri Gaisler of Gaisler Research
• Best Demo of an Application running on an FPGA - Martin Johansson, Jiri Gaisler of Gaisler Research
• Best Adaptation of a Single-thread Application to a Multi-thread CMT Environment - Andrey Brito, PhD student at the Systems Engineering Group at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany.
• Best submission that makes a substantial contribution to the OpenSPARC community and does not constitute any of the other mentioned categories - Kushal Datta, Graduate student at University of North Carolina

Listen to the podcast with the grand prize winners

Go here for details on the winners and their contributions