There is nothing BASIC about democratizing chip design

A new NYU Tandon School of Engineering initiative aims to provide non-STEM professionals with fundamental semiconductor chip design skills, so they can pivot into key and emerging technological careers that help advance the objectives of the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act.

"BASICS" (Bridge to Application Specific Integrated Circuits) — which the National Science Foundation selected for its latest Experiential Learning for Emerging and Novel Technologies (ExLENT) investment — provides a self-paced 28-week online course that imparts foundational chip-design knowledge, culminating with each trainee fabricating and testing their own chip.

The CHIPS Act aims to bolster the United States’ leadership in creating better and more energy-efficient chips for specific uses. Fulfilling this goal requires a significant expansion of a chip-design workforce capable of turning new ideas into actual microchips.

BASICS promises to open career pathways for non-traditional professionals and strengthen U.S. leadership in the microchip field. Participants will learn how to design Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), chips tailored for specialized tasks rather than general-purpose computing, that are crucial to fuel innovation across fields including medicine, cybersecurity and more.

"With BASICS, we're welcoming a diverse group of professionals to learn chip design, which has long been restricted to a select group of computer engineering specialists," said Siddharth Garg, Institute Associate Professor at NYU Tandon and a member of BASICS executive committee. "The program not only opens doors of opportunity to its participants, but grows a broad pool of talent skilled in specialized chip design, crucial for the CHIPS Act to live up to its mission."

The course is a collaboration between NYU Tandon’s Bridge program — which prepares non-technical professionals to apply for some of Tandon’s master’s degree programs — NYU Tandon’s Computer Engineering program, and the online curriculum "Zero-to-ASIC" which teaches participants how to design their own chips. 

The centerpiece of BASICS is its capstone project, a two-week chip fabrication sprint. Participants design their own ASIC using methods learned throughout the course, including AI-assisted design tools. They document their process and submit their designs to the platform TinyTapeout for actual fabrication. This hands-on project allows students to apply their newly acquired skills in creating a real, functional chip.

BASICS program graduates will receive professional education certificates similar to those of the Tandon Bridge program, making them eligible for various NYU Tandon Master's degree programs.

BASICS joins another NSF-funded project that NYU Tandon is launching to expand access to chip design training. In Chips4All — part of NSF’s prestigious Research Traineeship (NRT) program — doctoral and master’s students in a range of NYU’s STEM departments join with hardware-focused engineering counterparts, primarily from NYU Tandon’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, to learn each other’s fields and collaborate on designing domain-specific chips. 

The launch of BASICS and Chips4All adds to NYU Tandon’s efforts to democratize chip design, most notably with its recent high-profile Chip Chat project that led to the world’s first chip designed through natural-language conversations with a Large Language Model AI platform.

NYU plans to educate hundreds of BASICS participants over the next three years, starting in Spring 2025. 

Along with Garg, BASICS’ executive committee includes Ramesh Karri, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Chair and Co-Founder of NYU Center for Cybersecurity; Shivani Dhir,  Assistant Dean of Digital Learning at NYU Tandon; and Matthew Venn, science and technology communicator and electronic engineer.