The Basics of ASICs

An initiative to get teenagers designing and manufacturing their own ASICs and chips by Kai Pereira and Hack Club!

Welcome traveler!

Hack Club's been given a 1x1 slot on the wafer.space GF180MCU Run 3 MPW (multi-project-wafer) from DeepAI which means that we're going to create Hack Club's very own chip, for students 13 - 18 years old.

Essentially how it works is that we'll split up the core area on the chip into over 100 individual tiles each about 340x160um, which represent one of your designs, and then multiplex them onto the IO pins. We'll be receiving 1000 of these chips alongside breakout boards and will send you each a chip/breakout board with everyone's designs on them.

Getting onto the chip is really easy! Just make a chip design with the Tiny Tapeout Global Foundries template and then create a write-up of how your chip works and then we'll send you an FPGA board and logic analyzer to test your design on physical hardware. Once you verify it actually works, you can submit to get on the shared chip!

Your design needs to be done by the end of November. If you also need more tiles just let me know, but try to minimize your design to fit on one tile.

If you're a bit overwhelmed by where to start, check out the resources page.