Democratizing IC Design: The SSCS PICO Program
The Solid-State Circuits Society is committed to improving diversity, inclusion and accessibility in integrated circuit (IC) design. We envision a future in which chips can be designed through a web browser, by anyone, anywhere and through open worldwide collaboration.
Through its Platform for IC Design Outreach (PICO) program, the SSCS is working with the rapidly growing open-source community to help accelerate the construction of the required ecosystem. Our goal is to help build and connect to new communities that share our excitement about IC innovation and its democratization toward a new wave of global impact.
The program provides education, mentoring and collaboration opportunities as well as sponsored fabrication runs. The initial driving forces and motivations for our program are described further in an SSCS Magazine article.
The following pages provide further information about ongoing activities:
SSCS Technical Committee on the Open Source Ecosystem (TC-OSE) GitHub portal
SSCS PICO Chipathon
SSCS PICO Code-a-Chip travel Grants
The following summary provides a timeline of PICO-related activities:
April 2021: The Solid-State Circuits Directions Committee (SSCD) organizes a free & open online workshop on “Democratizing IC Design” (YouTube, SSCS Magazine article). The event drew over 970 attendees, nearly 50% of which were in the Young Professionals age group.
June 2021: SSCS sponsors four open-source designs for silicon fabrication through Efabless’ chipIgnite program. The selections reflect our dedication to supporting undergraduates, as well as geographical regions that are presently underrepresented in IC design. Further details on these designs were published in an SSCS Magazine article.
July 2021: SSCS runs its first open-source IC design contest (AKA Chipathon). The contest received 61 submissions and a volunteer jury selected 18 teams from 9 countries. Through a three-month journey with weekly online meetups, these teams collaborated to combine their designs and fill the available silicon real estate (6 SSCS-sponsored shuttle seats) with a variety of analog and digital circuits (see SSCS Magazine article).
March 2022: SSCS forms a new technical committee focusing on the open-source ecosystem (TC-OSE). TC-OSE begins to oversee all open-source-related SSCS activities, including the open-source design contest, creation of open-source publication opportunities, as well as curation of best practices and open-source design resources (see SSCS OSE GitHub).
March 2022: SSCS launches its second open-source Chipathon. The contest received 54 submissions and a volunteer jury selected 22 teams from 10 countries. These teams combined their designs to fill 8 SSCS-sponsored shuttle seats for tapeout in December 2022. More information about the contest and its participants can be found in SSCS Magazine article1 and SSCS Magazine article2.
November 2022: SSCS launches its first Code-a-Chip travel grant competition targeting the ISSCC 2023. This contest aims to promote reproducible chip design using open-source tools and notebook-driven design flows. Participants submitted an open-source Jupyter notebook detailing an innovative circuit design and a volunteer jury selected the winners (see announcement).
February 2023: SSCS launches its second Code-a-Chip travel grant competition targeting the VLSI Symposia 2023. The announcement of the winners can be found here and further information is available in an SSCS Magazine article.
March 2023: SSCS launches its third open-source Chipathon with a modified format to stimulate community building and collaboration. 12 teams from 7 countries work toward a common “lab bench on a chip design.” The project and its goals are described further in an SSCS Magazine article. This event was made possible by a generous silicon donation from GlobalFoundries (using the GF180MCU Open Source PDK).
November 2023: SSCS launches its third Code-a-Chip travel grant competition targeting the ISSCC 2024. The announcement of the winners can be found here.
January 2024: Members of the SSCS open source community publish an SSCS Magazine article on the state of the ecosystem.
February 2024: SSCS launches its fourth Code-a-Chip travel grant competition targeting the VLSI Symposia 2024. The announcement of the winners can be found here.
March 2024: SSCS launches its fourth open-source Chipathon with the theme “Automating Analog Layout.” The goal is to advance the automatic generation and open sharing of analog circuit layout cells to increase our community’s design productivity and to catch up with other fields where sharing and automation is a key enabler of progress (e.g., in machine learning).