Introducing industrial design flow of an RFIC chip to a graduate course: building the ecosystem and bridging the gap between industry and academia

Abstract

Radio-frequency integrated circuits (RFICs) design and fabrication require sets of skills that are professionally earned through years of hands-on experiences in a developed industrial environment such as fabless design houses. Difficult design specifications, dynamic working environment, and tight deadlines in ruthless time cycles of design to mass production are all, but few examples that academia often fails to train young engineers to face. In general, no skill-based education can be easily found for fresh graduates interested in a career in IC design. As part of an industry-oriented graduate course in RFIC, students were introduced into industry design flow through lectures and major project assignments. The latter were selected to form an integrated design flow that ultimately leads to the design of a full RFIC. Students were offered to select design blocks as projects and were given specifications to meet, extracted from a transceiver architecture study. The outcome of the work showed an interesting trend of students starting their design in individual efforts, but later clustering together in team effort to match their designs together and to finish their tasks at the fictitious tape-out deadline.