Title: Tapeout Class: designing sophisticated CMOS circuits in a single semester

Abstract: In the spring of 2017, the UC Berkeley department of EECS introduced an innovative new course: “28nm SoC for IoT.” This course went far beyond schematic-level design typical of circuits education and resulted in a chip going out for manufacturing. Ten students with no prior IC experience designed and laid out a System-on-Chip in ST 28nm FD-SOI CMOS including a 2.4GHz transceiver, baseband filtering, ADC, Bluetooth MAC, a RISC-V CPU, and internal power regulation.

Since then the class has grown to more than sixty students each year, typically designing three separate chips in 16 nm FinFET technology.  Recent chips have demonstrated functional digital accelerators for fast-fourier transform, convolution, sparse matrix multiplication, and quantized transformers, as well as analog bandgap references, voltage regulators, and Bluetooth transmission to cell phones, all designed by undergrads in a single semester.  This talk will cover the basics of how the course is run, and hopefully lead to a discussion of how EECS students and faculty can partner with SSL on future opportunities. 

Bio: Kristofer Pister is a professor of EECS at UC Berkeley working on autonomous micro robots, MEMS, and low power circuits. He shared the IEEE Solid State Circuits Society 2024 Innovative Education Award for his work developing the Tapeout Class.

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Title: GammaTPC: a transformational MeV-GeV gamma ray instrument concept

Abstract: I will talk about GammaTPC, a new MeV-GeV gamma-ray instrument based on liquid argon time projection chamber (TPC) technology. The MeV sky is poorly measured, in large part because of instrumental challenges. A transformative instrument in this energy range will enable a broad range of measurements, especially in the upcoming era of multi-messenger transient astrophysics. Core to GammaTPC is GAMPix, a new fine grained charge readout architecture that achieves low noise, fine-grained event imaging at very low power. There are also a few other amusing challenges to fielding a liquid noble TPC in low Earth orbit.

Bio: Tom Shutt is a faculty member at SLAC, and has spent much of his career on a series of experiments seeking to directly detect interactions of particle dark matter in a terrestrial detector, including the currently world-leading LZ experiment.  His focus has been on instrument development, and he has recently been exploring the use of detector technology developed for dark matter and neutrino physics to measure gamma rays.

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