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.