Tapeout class: Taking students from schematic to silicon in one semester
David C. Burnett, Brian G. Kilberg, Rachel S. Zoll, Osama U. Khan, Kristofer S. J. Pister · 2018
In the spring of 2017, the UC Berkeley department of EECS introduced an innovative new course: "28nm SoC for IoT." This course went far beyond schematic-level design typical of circuits education and resulted in a chip going out for manufacturing. Ten students with no prior IC experience, nine undergraduate and one graduate, designed and laid out an SoC in ST 28nm FD-SOI CMOS including a 2.4GHz transceiver, baseband filtering, ADC, Bluetooth MAC, a RISC-V CPU, and internal power regulation. The transceiver, baseband, ADC, and power regulation were successfully fabricated. This paper discusses the instructors' experiences and results with this course.