From bits to chips: a multidisciplinary curriculum for microelectronics system design education

We describe a program in multidisciplinary education of microelectronics systems design at the University of Notre Dame. In the "Bits-to-Chips" course sequence, faculty from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering Departments, and the Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning have coordinated their related courses and teaching methods, and team-teach a course on advanced technologies and systems-on-a-chip (SOC). Projects in the capstone course have involved the design and fabrication, completely by the students, of CMOS circuits with 10,000 transistors, and are now developing projects with roughly 50,000 devices. A recent project is an accelerometer control chip for insertion into a model rocket launch. Projects are also submitted to MOSIS for comparison with the students' efforts.