TinyTapeout Submission

Key Insight

Participating in a TinyTapeout shared multi-project wafer run makes custom silicon design accessible to individual developers at a fraction of the usual cost. A full ASIC tapeout — the process of sending a finalized chip design to a semiconductor foundry for fabrication — typically costs millions of dollars. TinyTapeout sidesteps this by dividing a single chip into hundreds of tiny slots and combining many designers' work onto one wafer. Preparing a small digital design for submission teaches the fundamentals of ASIC design: writing logic in a hardware description language, running design-rule checks against the open-source SkyWater 130nm process design kit (PDK), and understanding how standard cells are placed and routed on physical silicon.