Bristol Students Design Their Own Computer Chips in a Single Workshop

Every phone, every games console, every hospital scanner runs on chips which someone somewhere has had to design gate by gate. That person is usually someone with years of training and access to expensive professional software. This month in Bristol over 50 university students got a go at it themselves and many left with a chip design of their own.

The hands on workshop was run by Vulkos (a student start-up) in conjunction with the University of Bristol’s Electrical and Electronic Engineering Society (BEEES). It was part of UniChip, an inter-university scheme which gives students across the UK and Europe the opportunity to gain practical experience in chip design. The other universities involved are Cambridge, Gdańsk University and Riga Technical University.

From logic gates to chip layouts

They started off with the basics of digital logic (the AND, OR and NOT operations that every computer is built from), then moved on to simulating their designs, creating chip layouts and getting them ready for manufacture. A layout is the physical map of the chip (where the transistors are and how the tiny metal wires connect them).

The normal barrier is software. The professional chip design tools come with licences and NDA’s and it can take up to nine months to get them running in a university lab. Vulkos runs in the browser. Groves says on the day “within five minutes” over 50 students were designing their own chips in their browsers.

The company has its own origin story. Vulkos started life as a masters project by three Bristol students Matt Groves, Max Eland and Tom Atkins. They all graduated this summer and launched the company in July having discovered just how difficult it is to get any real hands-on experience in chip design.

Bristol’s chip-making roots

Bristol has a long pedigree in semiconductors. Inmos, the British chipmaker who made the Transputer, spawned a whole generation of local chip companies. One industry insider described the situation as “almost every silicon company in the Bristol area has some Inmos people in it”. That tradition continues today. Leonardo Coppi, a Bristol graduate and IET Future Talent Award Scholar who is now a graduate silicon engineer at Graphcore, gave a talk to the students. Engineers from Arm and Imagination also came along and gave talks on careers in semiconductor engineering. If you’re wondering whether electronics is the right path for you then our guide to which engineering discipline is right for you might be of use.

What comes next

The UniChip programme is running across 5 universities over a two month period and students are being actively encouraged to continue to develop their designs in competition teams. The real challenge is scale of course: how do you take thousands of interested beginners and turn them into chip designers that the industry needs, without the nine months of setup that would normally be required?

What this means for you

Behind it all are the electronic engineers who design the logic in the chips, the silicon engineers who take that design and turn it into a physical layout and the verification engineers who test it prior to manufacture. Many of these people will have an electronic engineering degree and our guide to studying and working in electronic engineering will go into the options available. Computer Science is also a very good subject to study and our guide to how Computer Science at A-level prepares you for a career in engineering will explain why.