What is an example of an MPW program?

The Google shuttle run through Efabless is an example of an MPW, where many designers submit their chips to share a single Skywater wafer.

How many MPW tapeouts has the Zero to ASIC course made?

Members of the course participated on all the Google sponsored MPWs until they were discontinued. Now all participants use Tiny Tapeout for manufacture, which is a multi project chip manufactured on an MPW.

MPW

Q: What is a Multi Project Wafer (MPW)?

An MPW is a wafer that carries many different designs simultaneously, so the Non Recurring Engineering (NRE) costs of making the mask set are shared between all the participants, making it much cheaper for each individual project.

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November 13, 2020

A Multi Project Wafer is used to reduce the cost of making an ASIC. By using a lot of different designs on the same wafer the Non Recurring Engineering (NRE) costs of making the mask set are shared between all the participants.

mask

The Google shuttle is an example of an MPW.

Our MPW submissions

So far we have made 4 tapeouts to the Google MPWs:

MPW physical implementation

We sent John McMaster some chips to take a look at from MPW1. Here presented his findings at OpenTapeOut

And you can browse his microphotographed die here

Course feedback

The part I enjoyed the most was going back to the Verilog and seeing test benches pass. In particular the waveform viewer. At the latter parts of course you're simulating the entire Caravel system on chip with a RISCV core. Being able to drill down into everything inside that core, I can log the program counter, I can log all the address and data buses and you can just see in exquisite detail what the system is doing, and it's doing that because I programmed it. Being able to drill down into that detail was really fascinating.

Jonathan Pallant (digital course)