UW-Madison's First Chip Design Club

Announcements

Upcoming

First Kickoff Meeting Wednesday!

Come meet the team, hear what we’re building this year, and find out how to get involved. No prior experience needed! Every major and class year is welcome.

Please fill out this form if you're interested.

Date Wed, Sept 9
Time 7:00 – 9:00 PM
Location Morgridge Hall
Room 2516

What We Do

Chip design is one of the world’s most important and fastest-growing fields, yet it has a high barrier to entry that makes hands-on experience difficult to get in college. SiliconBadgers will make chip design accessible to students of all experience levels. We will teach the fundamentals of digital design, verification, and the chip-development process, while bringing in guest speakers from companies like NVIDIA, Apple, AMD, and Intel to share their experiences in the industry and help members build connections.

Our first major project is a small open-source machine-learning accelerator: a homemade mini-TPU running on an FPGA, with a custom instruction set, compiler, simulator, and Python runtime built around it.

Skills You Can Build

SiliconBadgers is designed to take you from the basics to contributing to a real chip-design project.

01

Digital Design

Learn digital logic, computer architecture, SystemVerilog, and RTL—the hardware code used to design digital circuits.

02

Verification

Create testbenches, find bugs, and make sure hardware designs work correctly through simulation and debugging.

03

Physical Design

Turn digital designs into chip layouts, learning floorplanning, placement, routing, and timing analysis.

04

Software & Machine Learning

Work on instruction-set design, Python tools, compilers, and machine-learning models that run on our accelerator.

Sponsors

Leadership

Rohan Sharma

Rohan Sharma

Co-Founder / President

rsharma232@wisc.edu

Bilal Usman

Bilal Usman

Co-Founder / Vice President

busman4@wisc.edu

Aaron Diong

Aaron Diong

Event Coordinator

diong@wisc.edu

Soham Gupta

Soham Gupta

Outreach Chair

sgupta422@wisc.edu

FAQ

Do I need prior experience to join? +
Not at all. Our goal is to take students who may not even know what a chip is and teach them the skills needed to eventually contribute to designing and verifying one.
Is this open to all majors and class years? +
Yes. While the material draws on electrical/computer engineering and computer science concepts, we welcome students from any major and any year — undergrad or grad — who are interested in chip design.
How do I join? +
Fill out the Google Form and join the Slack.
Who do I contact if I have questions? +
Use the contact form.