Design of innovative integrated circuits in education

Abstract

Teaching practical ASIC design, one faces a lot of problems, such as high manufacturing costs, long workflow, and heterogeneous previous knowledge of the students. On one hand, it is difficult to find topics that motivate students and, at the same time, are not too complex. On the other hand, the industry requires students who are trained not only theoretically, but also have practical experience in team work and project management. We regard these problems as a challenge and are going to create a concept of a project-oriented ASIC design course that focuses on teaching hard and soft skills.In this paper, we describe our concept for a student project work, which leaves to the students a lot of degrees of freedom in the design process and offers the possibility to realize an own idea as integrated circuit.