> I wish opportunities like these were available back in my college days.
I'm forgetting the source, but some book I read discussed some period of silicon valley as a place where colleges quite routinely exposed students to chip-making. It sounded like the fabs of the area greatly supported these efforts. I'm not sure where I read it but it's stuck with me across many years, always strongly affirming my belief that people, when given exposure to how & means to do, begin many great things.
I'm sure students in the valley have been routinely exposed to VLSI chip-making, and actually making ICs, since at least the early 90s. I know I was.
The main problem is there are only so many universities with so many sections therefore quite a lot of students don't get exposure, even within a given EE department. And even if they could offer it to all students, many wouldn't enroll, as you're basically doing this class constantly for like a year, for not that many credits relative to the time spent, as it sucks down just tons of hours as one gets familiar with all the nitpicky details that one needs to know. And as one learns to deal with the joy that is CAD tooling.
However, in my opinion, the experience in invaluable. And students that can pass that course, with a successful chip in hand, are hand picked by employers. We sure do.
EE272 at Stanford actually started to post their flow. Another benefit of the open source PDKs.
This was kicked off by Lynn Conway's famous VLSI design course at MIT [1], which began the Mead & Conway revolution.
You can find a more detailed write-up of that course and other courses it inspired (as well as some of the practical challenges involved) in her retrospective in IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine [2].
An excerpt:
> "Importantly, these weren’t just
any designs, for many pushed the
envelope of system architecture.
Jim Clark, for instance, prototyped
the Geometry Engine and went on to
launch Silicon Graphics Incorporated
based on that work (see Fig. 16).
Guy Steele, Gerry Sussman, Jack
Holloway and Alan Bell created the
follow-on ‘Scheme’ (a dialect of LISP)
microprocessor, another stunning
design."
Wow that second link ("Reminiscences of the VLSI Revolution") turned out to be a 29 page rabbit hole providing a fantastic glimpse into the history and early days of chip design and engineering, thanks a lot for posting that! Here's a direct link to the PDF: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.69...
ARPA (and later DARPA) had a deal with MOSIS back in the late 70s and early 80s to fab chips for projects they funded (I remember this being used at MIT and Stanford at least, and surely others I wasn’t exposed to).
I'm forgetting the source, but some book I read discussed some period of silicon valley as a place where colleges quite routinely exposed students to chip-making. It sounded like the fabs of the area greatly supported these efforts. I'm not sure where I read it but it's stuck with me across many years, always strongly affirming my belief that people, when given exposure to how & means to do, begin many great things.