At UCLA, there is a Tapeout course (209AS) which is a special course taught by Professor Razavi teaching us about circuit design and preparing to tapeout a chip. This course allows students to design their own chip and learn the process of designing, layout and fabrication from start to finish.
Under Professor Razavi, this is a year round course (three quaters) and our class is the 3rd generation to take this course. The 1st quater (Winter) focuses on learning different circuits: StrongArm Latch, Divide by 2 C2MOS, etc. The 2nd quater (Spring) focuses on the tapeout, designing your circuit, doing layout and submitting chip to be taped-out. During the summer, this time is designed to create the PCB for our chips. In the 3rd quater (Fall), the chip will come back alongside our PCB and testing/verification is being done. Hopefully the chip works as designed.
Before designing the our desired chip, we learned to be proficent in Cadance Virtuoso, both circuit wise and layout wise. Here are some of the assignments that we were assigned to design.
Ring Oscillator
Divide by 2
Strong Arm Latch
8-bit Resettable Static-CMOS Register
LC Oscillator