Circuits
and Chips

a place to write on software, chip development and linux, for fun and in an informal way.





About

I work as an EDA Tools Engineer in a semiconductors company. My team is responsible for EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tools support and custom tools development for all mixed-signal and digital design teams across the company. I started my career after graduating with a Bachelors degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering in 2021. I think an EDA Tools Engineer role is cool because one can get a great exposure on the entire chip development flow starting from the RTL till the mask preparation and also I get to write code that is linked with the chip design. My job expects me to have knowledge on a broad range of topics (Digital Backend design, Software development, DevOps, Mixed-signal layouts and many more.)

I have been monitoring opensource chip development since 2021 and I think this is a potential ecosystem. This started receving a lot of traction since 2020 with opensourcing the Skywater Technologies 130nm manufacturable PDK for the first time, with the help of Google. This is a huge deal because now anyone can literally get their design manufactured (yes, get the chip!) provided they have prior knowledge on IC development. Check this video to get a better understanding on what I am talking about (link). Not to mention, the entire Semiconductor industry got a lot of traction during that time because of the chip shortage and every country was looking for an opportunity to enter into the supply chain. So the time when I started my career, was one of the hottest times in the industry itself. There was a whole different situation in the geo-politics however. I have been randomly contributing to a few opensource projects in this domain which helped me learn a lot of stuff.

I initially started this blog, Circuits and Chips , to write/document/organize things that I get to work with, in the semiconductors domain. But later on I got exposed to many other topics after understanding that this domain is one big ocean, so I am keeping this blog informal and fun while writing my experiences.

I am also a member of IEEE [since 2019] and IEEE Solid State Circuits (SSCS) Society [since 2020].



Note: The theme of this blog is inspired from OpenCircuitDesign which is maintained by Timothy Edwards - one of the leading people in Opensource EDA and chip development tools, and one of my favorite and inspiring engineers. If you are a software and/or a semiconductors engineer, I would highly recommend to follow his work.