NEWS
Photo: Academician Wu Hanming from the Chinese Academy of Engineering delivers a speech at the opening of the course.
Recently, the School of Integrated Circuits at Zhejiang University, in collaboration with the Zhejiang Integrated Circuit Innovation Platform, successfully held the Mini MPW tape-out demonstration course.
This demonstration course focused on three directions: analog, digital, and devices, relying on the only 12-inch integrated circuit process technology research and public service platform in the country. It attracted 117 graduate students to participate. This course significantly expanded the scale and depth of student participation by reducing the unit tape-out cost, allowing more students to fully engage in the complete practical training process from circuit design, layout implementation to tape-out manufacturing. This initiative effectively addresses the current issue in integrated circuit talent training in universities, which often emphasizes design simulation over practical process experience, providing a feasible path demonstration for integrating large-scale tape-out into the classroom.
ZJUIC
01 Industry-Academia Collaboration to Break Through Talent Training Bottlenecks
Photo: Training scene of the Mini MPW tape-out demonstration course.
The integrated circuit industry has high demands for practical skills, but there is often a “last mile” gap between university training and industry needs. This Mini MPW tape-out demonstration course focuses on the entire process of CMOS platform technology and design, helping students master core skills such as circuit design, EDA tool application, and tape-out preparation through standardized teaching and hands-on guidance, ultimately resulting in the production of self-designed physical chips.The course implements “classroom to workshop, research to production line,” allowing students to experience the complete process from design to tape-out, effectively shortening the gap between talent training and industry demand, and helping students translate theory into practice, providing the industry with high-quality application-oriented talents with real project experience and job adaptability.
This course also innovatively introduced the integrated circuit design and manufacturing integrated multimodal large model FabGPT as a virtual assistant, forming a new path for large model empowerment in integrated circuit talent training, which has good demonstration value. The large model is open for student use and is deeply integrated into classroom teaching scenarios, allowing students to not only access the large model in real-time for knowledge retrieval, problem-solving, and case analysis but also to leverage its data processing and reasoning capabilities for experimental design and solution optimization.
02 Full Practical Training to Cultivate Versatile Talents
Photo: Sun Yuliang, Application Engineer Director at Gallen Electronics, teaching on-site.
The college actively promotes an integrated training model of “innovative research + engineering practice,” establishing a stratified and categorized talent training system aimed at cultivating versatile integrated circuit talents who understand both design and manufacturing. Through course training, students completed the entire process of circuit design, layout drawing, and pre- and post-simulation, with their designs being actually tape-out by the Zhejiang Integrated Circuit Innovation Platform. Meanwhile, students can track the tape-out progress in real-time through the WIP management system of the Zhejiang Integrated Circuit Innovation Platform and participate in subsequent testing and verification.
03 Industry-Education Integration to Serve National Strategic Needs
✦ZJUIC
Based on the national integrated circuit industry development strategy,the college aims to “solve core problems in the field and achieve high-level technological self-reliance and strength” as its core goal, actively constructing and deepening a new mechanism for industry-education integration. By continuously exploring teaching and practice models that are close to industry realities, the college strives to promote the deep and organic connection between the education chain, talent chain, industry chain, and innovation chain, laying a solid foundation for talent in industrial development.
The holding of the Mini MPW tape-out demonstration course is an important practice for the college to implement the concept of industry-education integration: the course not only provides students with a high-quality learning and training platform but also promotes the transformation of academic research into industrial applications by guiding students through the complete process from design to tape-out, effectively enhancing students’ engineering practical abilities and innovative qualities, and helping to cultivate high-quality professionals that better meet industry needs.
Text and images by Zhao Furong, Zhejiang Integrated Circuit Innovation Platform
Editor: Xu Xin
Chief Editor: Xu Siqi
Reviewer: Min Haoyu
