Chip design is how text becomes silicon: hardware described in a language, proved correct, pushed through synthesis and place-and-route, and shipped as a die with billions of transistors. This master's-level course teaches the whole craft by building things — real SystemVerilog at every step — and aims it at the most remarkable chips of our era: it finishes with GPUs, from warp schedulers and rasterizers to tensor cores and chiplets, and a minimal working GPU you can watch execute a kernel cycle by cycle.

The arc: register-transfer-level design and industrial verification, FPGAs, the ASIC front-end (synthesis, timing, clocks, power) and back-end (standard cells through tape-out, yield and chiplets), then a RISC-V CPU built in RTL, a system-on-chip around it, and the GPU half — why throughput processors exist, the compute microarchitecture, the graphics pipeline in silicon, the modern frontiers, and the capstone build. It assumes fluency with digital logic and the Computer Architecture course's foundations, and pairs naturally with Reversible Computing (the thermodynamic endgame of the energy story told here).

Module 0 — Background

Module 1 — Digital design in RTL

Module 2 — Verification

Module 3 — FPGAs

Module 4 — The ASIC front-end

Module 5 — The ASIC back-end

Module 6 — Build a CPU

Module 7 — SoC integration

Module 8 — Why GPUs

Module 9 — GPU compute microarchitecture

Module 10 — Graphics hardware

Module 11 — Modern GPU frontiers

Module 12 — Capstone: build a minimal GPU

Begin → What Is a Hardware Description Language?

The people

The subject's story runs through a remarkable cast: Jack Kilby, who soldered the first integrated circuit while everyone else was on holiday; Robert Noyce, whose planar version made it printable and who invented Silicon Valley's culture along the way; Gordon Moore, whose one extrapolated graph became the industry's fifty-year roadmap; Carver Mead and Lynn Conway, whose VLSI revolution let anyone who could learn the rules design a chip; and Sophie Wilson, whose ARM instruction set — sketched over an Easter break — now runs in three hundred billion devices. Behind them stand Boole, Shannon and Karnaugh, whose logic the silicon still speaks.