About the speaker
Boris Murmann is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He joined Stanford in 2004 after completing his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. Dr. Murmann’s research interests are in mixed-signal integrated circuit design, with an emphasis on sensor interfaces, data converters, high-speed communication, and machine learning. He currently chairs the IEEE SSCS Technical Committee on Open-Source Ecosystem (TC-OSE). He is co-director and a founding faculty of the Stanford SystemX Alliance. He is the faculty director of Stanford's System Prototyping Facility (SPF). He is a fellow of the IEEE. He has been Program Chair of the ISSCC and received numerous awards, including the Friedrich Bessel Research Award (2012).
Abstract
Over the past several decades, society has strongly benefited from free and open-source software. The open-source spirit has also expanded to hardware and has energized a maker community that collaboratively tinkers with embedded systems at the printed circuit board level. Exciting new developments surrounding the release of SkyWater’s open-source 130 nm-CMOS process design kit (PDK) have now also enabled access to custom chip design and fabrication for anyone. Inspired by the possibility of open collaboration in IC design, the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) has launched its new Platform for IC Design Outreach (PICO) in the summer of 2021. With this program, the SSCS intends to build new international communities that share our excitement about IC innovation and its democratization toward a new wave of global impact.
In its first year, the PICO program was focused on supporting the ramp-up of the open-source ecosystem through sponsored IC fabrication runs. Four sponsored shuttle run seats were used to support undergraduates and geographical regions that are underrepresented in IC design. Additional six seats were dedicated to an open-source design contest that ran from July-November 2021. The contest received 61 submissions and a volunteer jury selected 18 teams from 9 different countries. Through a three-month journey with weekly online meetups, these teams collaborated to combine their designs and fill the available silicon real estate with a variety of analog and digital circuits.
This talk provides an overview of ongoing SSCS PICO activities and reviews the broader goals of the fast-growing open-source movement.