July 25, 2005 —
The USC Viterbi School's MOSIS brokerage, which provides low-ocst
prototypes of new computer chips to companies and institutions nationwide also
provides the same prototype service free to students -- an educational service that
will celebrate its 25th birthday in August.
How important was this program to Michael McCorquodale, Ph.D. (U. Michigan, 2004)?
McCorquodale is now CEO/CTO of a new start- up company, Mobius
Microsystems, that is commercializing a chip that grows directly out of
his U-Michigan research. While a grad student, McCorquodale was able,
with the help of MOSIS, to get three versions of his design fabricated
— and version number three worked. In fact, it worked so well it won a
prize at the Design Automation Conference in 2003, and is now on its
way to becoming a Mobius product.
“The whole project has been MOSIS dependent,” he said. “When you’re a
student, there aren’t a lot of options.” Without MOSIS, he says, “we
wouldn’t have anything except an interesting idea.” But with it, he
said, “we had silicon we could demonstrate to investors and prospective
customers. “
Multiply McCorquodale's experience by hundreds for an idea of the
impact of the program as it approaches its 25th birthday. In 2004, the
year he received his Ph.D., MOSIS prototyped nearly 1000 chips for
students across the country.
All told, between 1990 and 2003, some 66,539 students have learned chip
design in MOSIS-associated programs, and a total of 13,734 designs have
been realized, according to a detailed report on the program prepared
by Richard Brown, a chip design expert formerly at the University of
Michigan who is now dean of the University of Utah College of
Engineering.
“There are innumerable examples of students who have learned to design
chips because the MOSIS service was there, and matured as VLSI
engineers through being able to test chips they had designed,” Brown
says.
In fact, notes Brown, in many case “the courses they took would not have been offered without MOSIS.”
The dollar analysis makes the magnitude of the MOSIS contribution
clear. In 2003, MOSIS fabricated a total of 852 student chips, 752 of
them instructional, another 135 research projects. Had the students and
researchers had to go out and pay market price to realize these chips,
the total bill would have come to $6.7 million.
César Piña is director of MOSIS, headquartered at the Information
Sciences Insittute in Marina del Rey, which is part of the Viterbi
School. For decades, MOSIS has been facilitating commercial chip design
by providing a secure, economical and reliable way of prototyping
chips.
MOSIS contracts directly with commercial chip foundries for wholesale
silicon “acreage,” and retails the subdivided space on an affordable
non-profit basis. “MOSIS keeps the cost of fabricating prototype
quantities low by aggregating multiple designs onto one mask set,”
reads the organization's fact sheet.
MOSIS has prototyped more than 50,000 chip designs for businesses,
government agencies and universities, including the originals of many
now widely used commercial chips, such as those used in Sun
Microsystems SPARC and SGI’s MIPS systems.
|
MOSIS director César Piña: “The bus leaves at a scheduled time,
whether it's empty or full. The student work goes in the empty seats.” |
These
architectures grew out of the work of David Patterson, a UC Berkeley
computer scientist, who divided his class into two teams who designed
some of the world’s first RISC chips — architecture that later found
its way into SPARC & MIPS.
The educational program dates back to August, 1980, when MOSIS began
offering what would otherwise have been waste space on chip runs to
students free.
After all paying customer have designs in place, in many runs, area
remains on the silicon blank. Waiting for more designs to arrive would
delay customers. Accordingly, the empty space is allocated, as
available, to students. "It's as if we were running a busline," said
Piña. “The bus leaves at a scheduled time, whether it's empty or full.
The student work goes in the empty seats.”
The process is not cost-free for MOSIS. Besides the work of placing the
designs into the mask, MOSIS staff must deal with questions and make
sure everything is according to specifications. “Our paying customers
need little help on this,” said Piña. “They know the design rules. But
the students are, often, coming in cold,” he continued — they know the
theory of chip design, but haven’t actually had the experience of
submitting a design for fabrication.
Piña estimates that answering such questions costs the brokerage an
average of 1-2 man-weeks per run, an expense that is written off as a
donation.
Between 1985 and 1996, DARPA and the NSF provided funding for such
activity. “We were sorry to see that support end,” said Piña, “But we
thought the program was too important not to continue.”
The professors and students taking advantage of the arrangement are
grateful. Don Bouldin, a professor of computer science at the
University of Tennessee, has been teaching chip design for more than 20
years, with students now working at Intel, Motorola, TI, and IBM. He
says his students have submitted nearly 200 chips for fabrication by
MOSIS under the program.
“It has been a highly motivating experience for my students.” Bouldin
explained. Along with the satisfaction of having their work actually
fabricated, the process “presents them with the realistic fear that the
project might not work, and therefore causes them to exert extra effort
in checking their work. Additionally, the experience of testing the
fabricated chips and comparing those results to simulations is very
valuable.”
Bouldin started a MOSIS users group that now has 3300 members, and
organized a continuing series of biannual conference aimed at bringing
together instructors and students using MOSIS. It can be a career saver
for some students. Professor Steve Long of the UC Santa Barbara has
been working with MOSIS as a researcher since the mid ‘80s. Now, he
reports, “I have 2 PhD students who are designing circuits to be
submitted to MOSIS… Both students are in their last year and have
outlived their original funding source. MOSIS MEP generously has agreed
to offer them space on some upcoming runs so they can verify their work
and finish writing their dissertations.”
Finally, what goes around comes around in the most direct possible way
for MOSIS. As a start-up entrepreneur, Michael McCorquodale no longer
qualifies for MOSIS student chip making. But he still needs to have
chips made to realize his designs for the product Mobius Microsystems
is building.
So “now we're a paying customer,” he reports. “We just did a chip. We got the silicon back through MOSIS.”
