IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Fall 2023 - 68

received a certificate from Dr. John
R. Long, the president of the SSCS,
and a big round of applause from the
audience. Since each winner is a captain
of a design team involved in this
application, this award is presented
to all team members.
" The Open Source Chip Design
Ecosystem " Workshop
Eight topics were presented in the
crowded workshop room (Figure 3).
One of the highlights was the presentation,
titled " The Journey of Two
Novice LSI Enthusiasts: Tape Out of
CPU+RAM in Just One Month, " by K.
Uchiyama and Y. Azuma, undergraduates
from the University of Tsukuba
(Japan). They expressed each step of
the tape-out process as their backpack
journey from their hometown to
Tokyo with quite a few topics, including
the difficult phases on the way and
the joy they felt when they successfully
reached the final destination.
The attendees enjoyed listening to
this progress, and their experience
may help to encourage people to get
involved in the open source ecosystem.
Together with the subsequent
presentations by key persons who
support the current and future open
source ecosystem, this workshop impressed
the workshop attendees until
the very end. It is also worth mentioning
that a lengthy discussion was
held on the use of the open source
ecosystem in the evening panel discussion,
titled " Can Universities Help
to Revitalize the IC Design Industry?
If So, How? " .
The Growing Activity of Open
Source Chip Design in Japan
The Chipathon 2023 Team Japan
consists of 12 volunteers from industry
and academia. Since the
team members are located in different
parts of Japan, the team will
be working remotely to design the
project. On 4 August, they held a
kickoff meeting where the members,
who had been working together on
Slack, gathered for the first time in
person. Although many of the team
members have no tape-out experience,
they are all truly interested in
IC design. The leader of Team Japan
is Prof. Akira Tsuchiya at the University
of Shiga in Japan (Figure 4).
Prof. Tsuchiya has been working
FIGURE 3: A scene from the workshop in the VLSI Symposium 2023.
on open source IC design and has
been a volunteer member of the SSCS
Chipathon since October 2022. He
has promoted open source IC design
and SSCS PICO activities in Japan. He
held several hands-on events-for example,
at the summer camp of the IEICE
ICD in 2022. Also, he gave several
talks about open source IC design
and his research on analog synthesis
in domestic conferences. And
now, he has recruited members and
applied to the latest Chipathon. Let's
look forward to the activities of the
new members of " Team Japan. "
It is your turn to organize your
own design team and join the SSCS
PICO Open-Source Chipathon program.
Please join us!
-Mirjana Videnovic-Misic,
Harald Pretl , Ali Sabir,
FIGURE 4: Prof. Akira Tsuchiya, an associate professor of the University of Shiga prefecture,
Japan, and a snapshot of the kickoff meeting (hybrid) of the Chipathon 2023 Japan team.
Zonghao (Chris) Li , and
Sadayuki Yoshitomi
68
FALL 2023
IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

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IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Fall 2023

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