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: The ESCAPADE Mission to Mars: Loitering around for Science

Abstract: ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) is a NASA low-cost mission of twin orbiters, Blue and Gold, to make the first simultaneous two-point measurements of the Martian hybrid magnetosphere, ionosphere, and the ion escape that has shaped Mars’ atmospheric evolution. The pair launched in November 2025 and has since been looping around the Earth–Sun L2 Lagrange point, awaiting a November 2026 trans-Mars injection that begins the cruise to Mars. During this ‘Earth Loiter Phase”, ESCAPADE made measurements of Earth’s distant magnetotail in a previously-unexplored region around 310 Earth radii downtail. Blue and Gold have returned an unprecedented set of two-point magnetic field and plasma data, sampling the structure and dynamics of the solar wind, magnetosheath, plasma mantle, tail lobes, and current sheet. Once at Mars, the two spacecraft will fly complementary orbits designed to separate spatial structure from temporal variability in how escape responds to upstream solar wind drivers. This talk will cover mission status, early results from the distant magnetotail campaign, and what two-point measurements will reveal about atmospheric loss at an unmagnetized planet.

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Title: Growing the mission: the mass argument for biological manufacturing beyond Earth, and the reliability argument against it

Abstract: Every long-duration architecture collides with the same arithmetic: consumables scale with crew-days and resupply does not scale at all. In-situ resource utilization is the accepted answer for propellant and oxygen. Biology extends that logic to what is hardest to store — food, pharmaceuticals, polymers, and the recycling of waste carbon and nitrogen — because it is the only manufacturing technology that replicates itself. You launch grams of cells and seeds rather than tonnes of product.

The Center for the Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space, which I directed until its performance period ended in 2025, was built to test whether that argument survives contact with engineering. The program developed plant-based production of on-demand therapeutics, engineered autotrophic microbes and nanowire–microbe hybrids that fix CO₂ and N₂ through electro- and photo-biological interfaces, and routes to high-performance bioplastics. It also produced the piece I will spend most of the talk on: a systems and techno-economic model that specifies loop closure and the mass, power and volume tradeoffs determining when biological production actually beats resupply.

The work remains at foundational technology readiness and I will discuss some of the barriers to implementation and scaling.

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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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