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.
SiliconBadgers is designed to take you from the basics to contributing to a real chip-design project.
Learn digital logic, computer architecture, SystemVerilog, and RTL—the hardware code used to design digital circuits.
Create testbenches, find bugs, and make sure hardware designs work correctly through simulation and debugging.
Implement designs on real FPGA hardware, then learn synthesis, timing analysis, and how to measure resource usage.
Work on instruction-set design, Python tools, compilers, and machine-learning models that run on our accelerator.
To join, please fill out the Google Form AND Join our Slack.
Have a question first? Contact us.
