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Analog ASIC Course Tapes Out Real Silicon

Oct. 3, 2024

Electronic Design’s Andy Turudic talks with Georgia Tech’s Shaolan Li about a hands-on course centered on silicon design that takes you from schematic through tapeout.

Andy Turudic

Related To: Electronic Design

In this episode of Inside Electronics, Electronic Design’s mostly-Analog Editor Andy Turudic chats with Georgia Tech’s Professor Shaolan Li about their ECE department’s new analog IC design course. Close to a dozen teams of three undergrads and one graduate student are fully hands-on designing real silicon, from schematic through tapeout.

Resumption of the course in a returning semester will focus on performing functional verification, after fabrication on a 300-mm wafer by Texas Instruments.

The following companion article is a suggested read that contains many more details:

Analog

Undergrad EE Students Await Their Newborn TI-Fabbed Chip Designs

Georgia Tech’s ECE undergrads design custom mixed-signal ASICs that are then fabricated by Texas Instruments on 300-mm wafers and returned for testing.

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About the Author

Andy Turudic | Technology Editor, Electronic Design

Andy Turudic is a Technology Editor for Electronic Design Magazine, primarily covering Analog and Mixed-Signal circuits and devices. He holds a Bachelor's in EE from the University of Windsor (Ontario Canada) and has been involved in electronics, semiconductors, and gearhead stuff, for a bit over a half century.

"AndyT" brings his multidisciplinary engineering experience from companies that include National Semiconductor (now Texas Instruments), Altera (Intel), Agere, Zarlink, TriQuint,(now Qorvo), SW Bell (managing a research team at Bellcore, Bell Labs and Rockwell Science Center), Bell-Northern Research, and Northern Telecom and brings publisher employment experience as a paperboy for The Oshawa Times.

After hours, when he's not working on the latest invention to add to his portfolio of 16 issued US patents, he's lending advice and experience to the electric vehicle conversion community from his mountain lair in the Pacific Northwet[sic].

AndyT's engineering blog, "Nonlinearities," publishes the 1st and 3rd monday of each month. Andy's OpEd may appear at other times, with fair warning given by the Vu meter pic.