About

We bring hands-on integrated circuit design to undergraduate students at the University of Toronto.

Students touch different aspects of IC design throughout the Electrical and Computer Engineering curriculum, but are seldom given the chance to apply those skills to design and fabricate a chip of their own. That is the gap we exist to close.

We partner with Tiny Tapeout and the Free and Open Source Silicon community to make that possible, using open-source tooling for digital, mixed-signal and analog design. The team is open to any interested student — no prior tapeout experience required.

What an ASIC is

Application Specific Integrated Circuits are the cornerstone of modern electronics. The process of fabricating one is known as taping out, for historical reasons.

Our mission

1. Create practical IC design opportunities for students
2. Contribute back to the open-source silicon community
3. Build resources for anyone interested in IC design

What we do

Our work runs across four areas, each throughout the academic year.

Learning about IC design

Internal education series — asynchronous projects, documentation and guided material introducing the open-source toolchain (LibreLane, OpenLane and friends), to get interested engineers ready to design their own IC.

Guest lectures — talks from industry and academia that scale from classroom knowledge to professional practice. Dates are on our Luma calendar.

Designing ICs

Design Kompetition — proposals — students propose and develop their own IC projects on a rolling basis, submitting milestones, development structure and technical documentation referencing existing designs.

Design Kompetition — development — selected projects move through design, layout, optimisation, verification and validation, with tapeout typically targeted around six months in.

IC Hackathon — a week-long design sprint where students onboard through workshops and mentorship, then submit a design for judging. Our inaugural hackathon in 2026 showed what undergraduates can do in seven days; we plan to run it during reading week each spring.

Growing the tools

FOSSi Foundation contributions — for students interested in the software backbone of IC design, there is open-source CAD and EDA work used across the community. Opportunities are announced as they open up.

Building a community

CanMUX — a partnership with schools across Canada, including UWaterloo, UCalgary and York, on the Canadian Microelectronics Undergraduate eXpo, an undergraduate-focused IC design conference.

Socials, graphics and webmaster — growing how the world encounters undergraduate IC design at U of T, and maintaining the technical infrastructure behind it.

The team

The team is led by Vraj Prajapati and Saptarshi Talukdar, with subteam directors for Webmaster, Socials, CanMUX (U of T liaison), IC Hackathon organisation, and Education. Director roles are filled through rolling recruitment.

We are building on two years of grassroots work. Our SimProc processor was taped out on the Tiny Tapeout TTSKY25b shuttle in November 2025, and the 2026 IC Hackathon marked a milestone for undergraduate IC design at U of T.

Interested in joining? See Get involved.