Purdue Starts Comprehensive Semiconductor Degree Programs in U.S.
eetimes.com
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Most of the coursework here seems to be very similar to what was available over a decade ago at the state university I attended for graduate school (my concentration was semiconductor device theory related). While I think this material is very interesting I don't know that the demand is going to be there for this type of field. Companies like Intel have dedicated smaller departments for process development which do the more academic work (for example the D1X facility).
My experience with fabrication organization is the need is much more process engineer and technician focused rather than semiconductor engineers. The high volume hires are in improving reliability, reducing cost etc. I don't think you really need the EE degree for this, more likely industrial engineering, chemical engineering or statistics.
This said, Purdue has always had a very strong program in the more device oriented semiconductor courses (Until his passing Robert Pierret the fellow who wrote some of the best and most used grad textbooks on devices called it home).
As a semiconductor lay-person, my expectation is that this course would really just be an organized curriculum around semiconductors, and if you completed it you'd be hopefully competitive getting a job at Intel/Qualcom/etc. I am not expecting them to be providing any fundamentally novel approaches to semiconductor theory or design. To me it makes sense that the same type of knowledge may have been at the graduate (or more advanced) level before.
So to my (ignorant, layperson) perspective, I see the value of this making semiconductor study more accessible. It's no longer something you have to do for a (for example) PhD, but rather a structured program that should lead to an increase in semiconductor experts.
Am I off base? When you say you feel like you are "missing what's different here", what would you expect? Is it typical for new academic physics programs to provide truly novel techniques?
What I mean is just that the announcement seems to be more of a branding exercise than a fundamental shift in what's included in a degree program. If you look at what they describe as the curriculum for example: undergrad: https://engineering.purdue.edu/semiconductors/degrees grad: https://engineering.purdue.edu/online/programs/masters-degre... These types of courses are very common among most curriculum I've seen as are many of the things they're offering (e.g. have a design fabricated something universities have done through MOSIS for quite some time or time in a university research fab which many schools have also had.
The positioning in the article seems to be highlighting the growing need for fab-type engineers though and I think that's not quite a match for what's on offer here. If you want to do very fundamental semiconductor device work like designing new device types or fabrication techniques there are some jobs in this but they do typically require a graduate education likely a PhD and are much more limited. If the construction of new fabs is what they are saying drives the need for a bigger wider program what is actually needed isn't device designers and engineers its tool owners, process managers, technicians/operators etc.
In semiconductors I'd say things are divided kind of between 1. Front End Design (Digital+Architecture and Analog) where the better and more plentiful jobs are (with more in the digital side) 2. Backend (timing closure, placement and routing, final simulations etc) 3. Process Design <-- this is where you're doing everything from figuring out how to manufacture a device you designed, implementing new and novel structures, doing a lot more 'chemical' type work potentially for things like interconnects etc. There are far fewer of these jobs 4. Manufacturing <-- running the process of operating a fab, making sure things are fast, repeatable and smooth, testing the output products from process stages to chip sort and test etc. This is much more full of technicians and some supervising engineers.
If I was trying to make an analogy to more software like roles, the manufacturing + backend folks are people running the build process, the process designers are a small library designing team and the frontend design teams are the bulk of the folks using all of the above to implement chip designs. You can get into the analog and digital design side with an EE masters in VLSI from most programs.
The programs Purdue offers can definitely get you into any of these types of role depending on what you do or are interested in, but what they're talking about in this writeup doesn't seem like a fundamental shift. If the goal was something more industry focused I could see perhaps creating a bunch of new courses or co-ops focusing on more industrial concerns (DFT/DFM, process management, simulating for non-idealities etc). I don't see the curriculum being wildly different in a way that things wouldn't slot into the more traditional roles at all. I don't think this is a bad thing, I just think this announcement is a bit more on the marketing side letting people know this is available.
As far as the provide truly novel techniques, I think there are plenty of those being designed for various special purposes in universities. Sometimes these designs lead to interesting industrial applications but the thing that's usually an issue is that industry focus is on predictable, low cost and high yield. The type of research industry will do typically enables generational jumps in density or power improvements etc but until its really necessary they'll wait to adopt highly novel academic research and then spend time figuring out how to make things manufacturable.
The reality of getting a job in semicondutors though is most likely you're going to do something design/verification related, process work will come to you from your fabricator in the form of a PDK (process development kit) which will have all the parameters of the process and rules for manufacturing (and perhaps a good set of standard cells you can use for digital implementations with the initial parasitic extraction work done etc). Like any job its a little more standard in practice and bit less focused on the exotic stuff ;)
I wouldn't say their program is significantly better or worse than any other, and my understanding is this focus on a "Semiconductor Degree" is just a reshuffling of courses already offered in EE and ECE degrees. Certainly there are teams far ahead of Purdue. The programs at UCSD and OSU that are pioneering the work on OpenROAD and Skywater 130 are the ones who are really ahead of the game. If I could be at any program in the US, those are where I would want to be.
That said Purdue is absolutely ahead of the average ECE program. Very few undergrad programs are completing tapeouts on a regular basis, even at schools that would otherwise have the funding to accomplish it. There are plenty of schools that think of ECE as "EE plus some CS courses" and don't even teach much HDL, much less how to layout a standard cell or do timing analysis.
Purdue's program is ok, but it's a veritable bastion of academic excellence compared to schools that have no staff that have ever performed a tapeout, which is most of them.
Electrical Engineering departments have tons of faculty who know what they're talking about. CS departments have people who mostly kinda sorta know what they're talking about (even if they're 10 years out of date, which is an eternity in CS).
I would wager most schools don't have a single faculty member who's performed a small tapeout, much less a big project for an industry leader. Actual ECE, VLSI, the building of chips, is a wasteland on the academic side of the house IMHO.
I'm at NYU Tandon and they are a decade behind on most stuff, the single VLSI course is an elective even for ECEs. I work with students from state schools all across the country, and the most common reaction I get with rising seniors coming from EE and ECE programs is "I have never seen any of this stuff before".
What I'm trying to say is: I've yet to meet an ECE senior who couldn't write Hello World in C or perform linear DC analysis, but it's surprisingly rare to find one who can layout a ring oscillator.
As cvccvroomvroom had mentioned, I had my VLSI chip fabbed at the MOSIS facility in Westborough MA, during my EE tenure at UMASS Amherst in the 1990s as part of a state-wide chip design competition (yeah - didn't win..). There was much activity on VLSI and computer system design at that time, things have certainly changed in the US.
I recall many entries were implementations of various (and obscure) mathematical algorithms, mostly in the frequency domain (hence DSP chips), that tried to solve problems that are now trivial in SW today.
My school did win occasionally, others were mostly MIT and WPI - I think in a large part due to the excellent professors at all competting schools and the work ethic of the students.
My final submission was the design for an Arithmetic Fourier Transform processor - trying to remove the need for expensive ROM by aliasing the signup up-frequency - which I did the barrel-based ALU for, and thank the grad students for including me in the project.
cvccvroomvroom: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31756704#31760353 MOSIS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSIS Barrel ALU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_shifter (my ALU did much more than multiply/divide..)
(edit - remove double paste)
edit: forgot to mention that I worked as a chip designer for many years right out of school.
"Courses will address supply chain issues in chemical engineering, mechanical engineering for tool development, thermal management, packaging, and material engineering as well as industrial engineering, logistics, and manufacturing optimization."
In fairness, I think overall there are no curricula specifically about how to run a factory. Most engineering degrees focus on design and theory rather than industrialization. For example, there are no classes on how to run datacenters for computer science majors.
Some discipline want to teach you basic so they do not stop you from innovation. Some just exposure (mba, mgt) so you have to deal with practical case, it’s complexity and not just theory.
IT is not just about computer research … hence may be one should expand one’s scope.
Link to online degree: https://engineering.purdue.edu/semiconductors/degrees#online...
Forcing students to live on-premises also makes universities money through student housing and amenities. Universities have concerns that opening their programs to online instruction would lead to an exodus from the campus. You could have 70% of a 20,000 strong student body attend online, and all the expensive real estate of the campus would mostly be a waste of money.
The academia is a community and a lifestyle. The people who choose that lifestyle generally don't want to spend too much time teaching outside the community. Teaching is a lot of work, a lot of bureaucracy, and a lot of hard deadlines, and it's not particularly rewarding if the students are just names on screen. Maybe if people paid higher taxes and higher tuition fees, universities could hire teachers to "just work here" and pay them competitive salaries.
- Even in my first attempt at college, I was never too concerned with the name/reputation of the school. My first go around I picked a state school that gave me a full ride, rather than going for the more prestigious options. So once I checked that the accreditation of WGU was indeed legit, that was good enough for me.
- Their admissions are based on your professional history, since they're set up to cater to working professionals, not high school graduates. (Heck, their mascot is the "night owl.") That means it didn't matter to them that my first attempt at college left me with a... bit of a "stained" transcript. That stopped me from getting into other online options, but my professional history spoke for me at WGU.
- I'm a huge fan of their competency-based education model. It isn't for everyone since the classes are self-paced and asynchronous, but it matches my personal abilities to self teach and to "binge" content. Plus, as soon as you enroll in a course you can take a pre-assessment that will unlock the final if you do well. For some of the courses I've spent over a decade in the workforce learning the content, so I was able to do the pre-assessment and then the final in a single day.
My current experience at WGU is short, but good. My term started June 1. I rocketed through a few of the classes that had test-based and code-based finals in the first week. Now I'm realizing just how out of practice I am with writing, because I'm in a pair of classes that have writing-based finals and I'm struggling more.
I don't personally know people that took their degree from WGU to another university for a Masters, but WGU maintains a list [0] of universities which have accepted WGU undergraduates into their graduate and/or doctoral programs.
[0] https://www.wgu.edu/alumni/career-support/education-and-prof...
There's a normative and substantial laboratory aspect to ABET-accredited[1] undergraduate engineering programs.
From Criterion 7:
>> Modern tools, equipment, computing resources, and laboratories appropriate to the program must be available, accessible, and systematically maintained and upgraded to enable students to attain the student outcomes and to support program needs.
[1] https://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/cr...
Most of the decent ones are expensive, and many still consider in/out of state tuition. There are a few good deals I've seen, highly dependent on being in-state.
The only "useful" ones you'll find tend to be CS, a handful of EE degrees exist online (no clue how that works) along with some other fields. Occasionally you'll find some in the natural sciences, but they tend to be BA's and explicitly for pre-law, pre-med, etc. I've seen maybe one online math degree and tons of social science ones, as well as "we made this major up to target to poor working people who will give us money".
At the end of the day, they exist, but are uncommon and probably not worth the price.
I researched going back to school online for years, but if I do it, I will probably do it in person (at least for the important years).
Perhaps this has changed, given that we're in a semiconductor boom cycle now, but I have my doubts. When SMIC started trying to poach TSMC talent, the response was not to make pay competitive (or even half decent), let alone in line with the massive geopolitically-relevant value being created. No, the response was a mask-off legislative crackdown to keep the nerds in line. In the US, there were only two big employers, and they were definitely paying what they could get away with.
Anyone who is considering this career -- any career, but this one especially -- before you jump, please get the perspective of someone in industry who isn't trying to sell you a career.
Every person I interacted with in the semiconductor space was either an academic who was stuck in a lab 12+ hours a day or some line manager for Intel/IBM/TSMC/etc. that was on-call 24/7 if something went wrong. Both of those sounded terrible to me regardless of the pay.
Terrible pay and terrible hours and long school and hard work is just irredeemable.
Ended up as a power systems engineer, which is the complete opposite in terms of scale from semiconductors!
That was until I did an internship following a grad student doing work on solar cells. Every day was sitting 8+ hours in one room doing CVD then XRD. It was soul crushing. I realized the program was more of a PhD-prep program and most people I know who graduated and didn’t go for a PhD either 1) went into software or 2) work as some menial process engineer working the “assembly line” with no meaningful upwards mobility.
I know a surprising amount of people who came out of CNSE (without following up with grad school) and are now landscapers, waiters, or similar. The skillset is so specialized as to be almost worthless unless you can find the right role imo. Also the program there CNSE/SUNY Poly is absolute hot garbage, I advise active looking at this field to go into conventional EE, ChemE, or Materials.
So yeah I do software now.
Is a foundry the only employer?
Last time I had close contact with the industry, digital design indeed was a bit more competitive and correspondingly it was the only one considered to have good career prospects -- but the offers were still between shabby and embarrassing next to entry level SWE, even outside the bay area.
This could have changed.
Then you have to manufacture. There is a significant cost for custom chips. Though once you get going the per chip cost is pretty low, thus the business lends itself to a few large players.
https://www.cgw.com/Press-Center/News/2014/Studios-Accused-o...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/04/apple-googl...
How about instead of idolizing people like this we charge them with felonies and put them in prison?
A mentor of mine hit his breaking point when they split/bankrupt/acquired his team to discharge pension obligations. Real nasty stuff. He said everyone was retiring, "good luck with the next node" (10nm) -- which I discounted as sour grapes on account of Intel appearing invincible at the time, but wow have the years cast that story in a different light.
Was that a joke? What's the point of doing two PhDs in the same field? That's like 12 years wasted. 1/8th of your life.
(Worked at Intel and along with fab/process folks for a bunch of years).
Everything you're seeing in the comments is true.
Compensation is not that bad. Clearly, it'll not pay SW salaries - no engineering does. But if you're a fab person, you'll work long hours, be on call often (and you will get woken up often), and eventually will own a tool that you'll be responsible for, even when not on call.
Lots of abusive and pathological behavior, as well. And they often block internal transfers so you're basically trapped.
People with other skills (e.g. SW) get out. The rest are stuck, because they have, for example, a chemistry PhD and no other company will pay more.
See this thread from a while ago:
Trust me, I've tried to talk them out of it and never succeeded.
For some reason, I assumed that in order to be a chip designer you had to be as good at programming as a developer. Then I became friends with two intel chip designers/engineers and was surprised that neither knew much of anything about programming, despite both having multiple PhDs in their fields. That's when I began realizing that engineering and programming are 2 entirely different fields that have little overlap.
Folks who work on Chromium think little of those who wrangle wordpress themes
Both require deep domain knowledge that doesn't always overlap - but being able to do both makes you more valuable
Things you can build and see and have immediate feedback.
That just doesn’t happen with chip design. Not that it can’t, and I’m sure there are examples (Woz’s paper and pencil circuit design come to mind) but it’s far from common, compared to coding.
I remember in 5th grade being asked to help another student write a choose-your-own-adventure style game in basic on an apple //e back in the “one per classroom if you are lucky” days.
I figured I was going to be a programmer as a profession but college came around and it was a coin toss for me between computer engineering and computer science. At the time, engineers made more money so I went with that. Doubled as an EE/CE. I was ok at the typical EE stuff, better at the little bit of programming we were exposed to (in pascal). I did very well in semiconductor physics, but I didn’t really get sucked into it. Got to a digital design class, and that hit the spot for me. I didn’t like plugging wires in on breadboards because it was entirely too frustrating trying to figure out which wire you got wrong, plus I’m colorblind and the shades of red and green insulation on wires are perfectly impossible for me to tell apart except under very very bright light. But I loved designing the synchronous digital logic.
It’s just not something you are super likely to randomly pick up on your own at an early age. And to be honest, even if I had been exposed to digital design back in grade school, I doubt it would have resonated. I could easily understand things like “GOTO 10.” Understanding clocked logic, or binary arithmetic probably wasn’t within my reach back then.
Nearly all of the EEs in my class had never programmed anything before the 2 classes in our curriculum. All the people that knew how to program went into CS (except for a few like me). So the few logic designers that come out of an EE program don’t seem very likely to be good at programming. Just different interests.
I worked for a supplier for AMAT/Intel/Samsung etc. and was basically on-call 24/7. I had to carry two laptops with me at all times (my personal one and a work one).
I didn't care because I was young, and well compensated, but they decided that they'd cut my pay by a third by converting me to a salaried employee. The unpaid overtime (previously paid as a contractor) lost its luster quickly. Once I realized I was subsidizing bad management because I was filling the gaps left by often intentional shortcuts taken-- for free, I bailed. That took... two months I think.
Points they told:
1. A mandatory PhD just to get at internship
2. Few years of unpaid internship needed to get a coffee porter job, before you are let anywhere close to the process
3. A postdoc is required to get a real R&D cred
4. 7-10 years in R&D sweatshop before any real promotion
5. Get very lucky
6. In 20-30 years of career, you can get to a VP level, where you can hold the company by the balls with critical knowledge. Then... and only then, you will look up to a 7 digit salary.
In any commercial organization, there are tremendous pressures in high-investment, super high-risk projects and anyone can trivially find things that are wrong with the current system. The much more difficult challenge is showing an alternate path that is superior - based on the results it achieves. The times when you see the ugly behavior of people are times of desperation. Online commenters expend a lot of effort point out how to improve things by "proving" it by linking to random studies - but the more persuasive argument is by implementing those changes in the real world. "Talk is cheap, show me the code." ;)
This code is working great!
Pay was not so great as judged by the cars. The other thing was that the workforce was split - you were either old or young.
If you want to make money in semiconductors, find a place they are building fabs and become a plumber or electrician. Those are the folks who make money, and often there’s security clearance requirements that adds job security.
Majority of ppl here are after electrical eng.
Cs seems to be easy in compare
In CS, you may have spent thousands or tens of thousands of hours across many years learning and growing, and still being limited in your understanding of the field as a whole. It's daunting to explore other related fields just to find out that they each have similar levels of complexity, filled with professionals who've sunk similar levels of effort, time, and years of their life into their work (who are often equally struck by the complexity of your field.)
Other times it has more to do with the particular brand of, ahem, fertilizer, they use.
Sometimes it really is greener and your side is shit and it's time to make a change.
In that kind of situation, you usually own the whole device. You don't have to worry about being removed from memory because the user wanted to run some hotel's booking app or whatever - the user doesn't have the option of doing that.
You may have some additional hooks that give you some control of whatever custom hardware that comes with the device. You may or may not have to drop down into native code to access those hooks.
You can't develop against a standard phone or tablet. You have to have your hardware to develop against.
So, yeah. It's the same... but it's different.
I find embedded really rewarding. A 20 year old embedded-C code base generally follows the same design patterns and coding conventions and styles that you'd use today, and don't feel "old" or like they need to be rewritten. A 7 year old JS code base, on the other hand, is largely outdated, and may be written in a nearly extinct framework by the time it is your turn to maintain it. If you get tired of giving up time on the weekends so you can learn a new framework, consider hopping over!
I'm exaggerating a little, but more power to those of you who suffer through it!
Typically the real time space is very conservative on what types of changes are implemented, and that's largely because a lot of rt software exists on safety critical systems that need to be supported for decades.
Ferrous Systems is making some good progress to make certification of Rust happen, through ferrocene[0] and other initiatives, but it will take time.
The only company I know using Rust in a sort-of embedded way is SoloKeys[1], using Rust to write the firmware of a hardware authentication token (similar to a yubikey).
Several automotive companies have been hiring for Rust, though what exactly they’re using it for isn’t as well known publicly yet.
There have been a few aerospace projects. And at least one train project, IIRC?
Its pretty great to be honest, I think I would have a hard time going back to C/++
Ppl who I worked with went into more web like jobs after semico
But later I'd want to work as compiler engineer
Also, the mistake I made when I went to grad school: Semiconductors seemed to be a "new" field compared to the rest of EE. One of my undergrad professors said "They still haven't figured out what a standard textbook should contain."
In reality, from a research standpoint, it's a very mature field. Don't expect low hanging fruit. If you're going to focus on theory, expect it'll take a number of years of dedicated study before you get to the frontier. You'll need to know quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, and some electromagnetics, just to begin studying semiconductor theory. Then a whole bunch of specialized solid state courses. Then you start studying the specific subtopics (reading key journal papers).
> But later I'd want to work as compiler engineer
Why are you wasting time with semiconductors...?
Because this company does both, so after I get bored with current role and prepare better, then i'll try to switch teams
I didnt and still do not see easier way for me to get into comps (i may be naive), especially that i dont know cpp yet, which seems like must have in compilers world unless you go to e.g msft
At least for the analog domain, Gray et al[1] has been the standard entry-level gateway drug for longer than I care to remember.
Semiconductor theory is more about the transistor and everything below it: Starting from quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, derive the equations of electron/hole transport in a doped semiconductor, how the material's band structure impacts current flow, etc. The derivation of the transistor equations is often the end point.
Is what?!
it's barely even engineering
Typically softeng roles require a degree in CS or equivalent, and many years of experience on top of that.
Then again, in some other companies "senior engineer" is somebody who did a 3-months bootcamp and 3 years of work. It's very unfortunate.
You wind up captive to a small number of employers in places that have few other employers. You have to be physically present--no online only. You will have weird hours because you have to slot into the fab plant openings. Your pay will be a small fraction of even a mediocre software developer.
I can go on and on.
There isn't a shortage of semiconductor personnel. We all fled.
Companies could pay people enough to come back. Like so many other fields, companies would rather do anything other than raise salaries.
Stay far away.
> The university has existing collaborations with the U.S. Department of Defense’s SCALE (Scalable Asymmetric Lifecycle Engagement) program, the American Semiconductor Academy, and other CHIPS Act workforce consortia
>"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."
THE M.I.T. 1978 VLSI SYSTEM DESIGN COURSE:
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/MIT78.htm...
A Guidebook for the Instructor of VLSI System Design:
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/InstGuide/InstG...
That book and course catalyzed the "Mead–Conway VLSI chip design revolution":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mead%E2%80%93Conway_VLSI_chip_...
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead
Lynn Conway's "Reminiscences of the VLSI Revolution: How a series of failures triggered a paradigm shift in digital design":
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/Memoirs/VLSI/Lynn_Co...
Also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25964865
Here's some historic Vintage VLSI Porn that I posted 6 years ago, from Lynn Conway's famous VLSI Design course at MIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8860722
DonHopkins on Jan 9, 2015 | on: Design of Lisp-Based Processors Or, LAMBDA: The Ul...
I believe this is about the Lisp Microprocessor that Guy Steele created in Lynn Conway's groundbreaking 1978 MIT VLSI System Design Course:
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/MIT78.html
My friend David Levitt is crouching down in this class photo so his big 1978 hair doesn't block Guy Steele's face:
The class photo is in two parts, left and right:
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Class2s.jp...
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Class3s.jp...
Here are hires images of the two halves of the chip the class made:
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/InstGuide/MIT78c...
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/InstGuide/MIT78c...
The Great Quux's Lisp Microprocessor is the big one on the left of the second image, and you can see his name "(C) 1978 GUY L STEELE JR" if you zoom in. David's project is in the lower right corner of the first image, and you can see his name "LEVITT" if you zoom way in.
Here is a photo of a chalkboard with status of the various projects:
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Status%20E...
The final sanity check before maskmaking: A wall-sized overall check plot made at Xerox PARC from Arpanet-transmitted design files, showing the student design projects merged into multiproject chip set.
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Checkplot%...
One of the wafers just off the HP fab line containing the MIT'78 VLSI design projects: Wafers were then diced into chips, and the chips packaged and wire bonded to specific projects, which were then tested back at M.I.T.
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Wafer%20s....
Design of a LISP-based microprocessor
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=359031
ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AIM-514.pdf
Page 22 has a map of the processor layout:
http://i.imgur.com/zwaJMQC.jpg
We present a design for a class of computers whose “instruction sets” are based on LISP. LISP, like traditional stored-program machine languages and unlike most high-level languages, conceptually stores programs and data in the same way and explicitly allows programs to be manipulated as data, and so is a suitable basis for a stored-program computer architecture. LISP differs from traditional machine languages in that the program/data storage is conceptually an unordered set of linked record structures of various sizes, rather than an ordered, indexable vector of integers or bit fields of fixed size. An instruction set can be designed for programs expressed as trees of record structures. A processor can interpret these program trees in a recursive fashion and provide automatic storage management for the record structures. We discuss a small-scale prototype VLSI microprocessor which has been designed and fabricated, containing a sufficiently complete instruction interpreter to execute small programs and a rudimentary storage allocator.
Here's a map of the projects on that chip, and a list of the people who made them and what they did:
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/SU-BK1.jp...
1. Sandra Azoury, N. Lynn Bowen Jorge Rubenstein: Charge flow transistors (moisture sensors) integrated into digital subsystem for testing.
2. Andy Boughton, J. Dean Brock, Randy Bryant, Clement Leung: Serial data manipulator subsystem for searching and sorting data base operations.
3. Jim Cherry: Graphics memory subsystem for mirroring/rotating image data.
4. Mike Coln: Switched capacitor, serial quantizing D/A converter.
5. Steve Frank: Writeable PLA project, based on the 3-transistor ram cell.
6. Jim Frankel: Data path portion of a bit-slice microprocessor.
7. Nelson Goldikener, Scott Westbrook: Electrical test patterns for chip set.
8. Tak Hiratsuka: Subsystem for data base operations.
9. Siu Ho Lam: Autocorrelator subsystem.
10. Dave Levitt: Synchronously timed FIFO.
11. Craig Olson: Bus interface for 7-segment display data.
12. Dave Otten: Bus interfaceable real time clock/calendar.
13. Ernesto Perea: 4-Bit slice microprogram sequencer.
14. Gerald Roylance: LRU virtual memory paging subsystem.
15. Dave Shaver Multi-function smart memory.
16. Alan Snyder Associative memory.
17. Guy Steele: LISP microprocessor (LISP expression evaluator and associated memory manager; operates directly on LISP expressions stored in memory).
18. Richard Stern: Finite impulse response digital filter.
19. Runchan Yang: Armstrong type bubble sorting memory.
The following projects were completed but not quite in time for inclusion in the project set:
20. Sandra Azoury, N. Lynn Bowen, Jorge Rubenstein: In addition to project 1 above, this team completed a CRT controller project.
21. Martin Fraeman: Programmable interval clock.
22. Bob Baldwin: LCS net nametable project.
23. Moshe Bain: Programmable word generator.
24. Rae McLellan: Chaos net address matcher.
25. Robert Reynolds: Digital Subsystem to be used with project 4.
Also, Jim Clark (SGI, Netscape) was one of Lynn Conway's students, and she taught him how to make his first prototype "Geometry Engine"!
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/MPCAdv.ht...
Just 29 days after the design deadline time at the end of the courses, packaged custom wire-bonded chips were shipped back to all the MPC79 designers. Many of these worked as planned, and the overall activity was a great success. I'll now project photos of several interesting MPC79 projects. First is one of the multiproject chips produced by students and faculty researchers at Stanford University (Fig. 5). Among these is the first prototype of the "Geometry Engine", a high performance computer graphics image-generation system, designed by Jim Clark. That project has since evolved into a very interesting architectural exploration and development project.[9]
Figure 5. Photo of MPC79 Die-Type BK (containing projects from Stanford University):
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/SU-BK1.jp...
[...]
The text itself passed through drafts, became a manuscript, went on to become a published text. Design environments evolved from primitive CIF editors and CIF plotting software on to include all sorts of advanced symbolic layout generators and analysis aids. Some new architectural paradigms have begun to similarly evolve. An example is the series of designs produced by the OM project here at Caltech. At MIT there has been the work on evolving the LISP microprocessors [3,10]. At Stanford, Jim Clark's prototype geometry engine, done as a project for MPC79, has gone on to become the basis of a very powerful graphics processing system architecture [9], involving a later iteration of his prototype plus new work by Marc Hannah on an image memory processor [20].
[...]
For example, the early circuit extractor work done by Clark Baker [16] at MIT became very widely known because Clark made access to the program available to a number of people in the network community. From Clark's viewpoint, this further tested the program and validated the concepts involved. But Clark's use of the network made many, many people aware of what the concept was about. The extractor proved so useful that knowledge about it propagated very rapidly through the community. (Another factor may have been the clever and often bizarre error-messages that Clark's program generated when it found an error in a user's design!)
9. J. Clark, "A VLSI Geometry Processor for Graphics", Computer, Vol. 13, No. 7, July, 1980.
[...]
The above is all from Lynn Conway's fascinating web site, which includes her great book "VLSI Reminiscence" available for free:
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/
These photos look very beautiful to me, and it's interesting to scroll around the hires image of the Quux's Lisp Microprocessor while looking at the map from page 22 that I linked to above. There really isn't that much too it, so even though it's the biggest one, it really isn't all that complicated, so I'd say that "SIMPLE" graffiti is not totally inappropriate. (It's microcoded, and you can actually see the rough but semi-regular "texture" of the code!)
This paper has lots more beautiful Vintage VLSI Porn, if you're into that kind of stuff like I am:
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPC79/Photos/PDF...
A full color hires image of the chip including James Clark's Geometry Engine is on page 23, model "MPC79BK", upside down in the upper right corner, "Geometry Engine (C) 1979 James Clark", with a close-up "centerfold spread" on page 27.
Is the "document chip" on page 20, model "MPC79AH", a hardware implementation of Literate Programming?
If somebody catches you looking at page 27, you can quickly flip to page 20, and tell them that you only look at Vintage VLSI Porn Magazines for the articles!
There is quite literally a Playboy Bunny logo on page 21, model "MPC79B1", so who knows what else you might find in there by zooming in and scrolling around stuff like the "infamous buffalo chip"?
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/VLSIarchive.html
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/VLSI.archive.spr...
A copy is available here https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/VLSIText/PP-V2/...
You're much better off doing software.
FYI: DeAnza College in Cupertino, CA has or had a small-scale wafer fab. There are also MOSIS and CEITEC types of fab services for small runs in education.
Anything at this scale?
https://oscar.gatech.edu/bprod/bwckctlg.p_disp_course_detail...
WLB just sucks in semiconductor industry.
China wants its silicium automony and is seriously working on it, India too as it seems.
US/america is actually restoring its silicium full autonomy.
Meanwhile in EU, we buy intel fabs... amazing way to build EU silicium autonomy.
At least, if RISC-V is a success, many chips from anywhere could move around and software should interoperate anywhere without toxic IP in the way or horrible compilers for abysmally complex computer language syntax. A part of the spectrum of chip types won't be able to move around due to "trust issues", but it should happen anyway for a still significant part of this spectrum.
Meanwhile, in Europe...