r/chipdesign • u/Existing-Club-8142 • 2d ago
Open Source Tools for job transition
Has anyone taped out a chip in IHP or tiny tape out to help boost their resume for a job swap? Let’s say jumping from low speed analog to RF? Or digital to analog etc.
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u/Ill_Huckleberry_2079 1d ago edited 1d ago
Tapeing out a full chip solo and tapeing out on tiny tapeout are two very very different endeavors.
In one case you are building some cool macros and giving credibility to your skills and in the other you are becoming a one man fabless semiconductor company.
The latter would defiantly give you the biggest a boost in interviewing, not because your tapeout out a chip on IHP but because you now know how to do EVERYTHING and you figured it out without any institutional backing.
For example, you can now have a full conversation on different pinout considerations, can talk about packaging economics, bring-up methodology, debugging OpenROAD (your gdb skills are about to get a whole lot better) and implementation flows (as in building a custom implem flow).
Has anyone done it, for tiny tapeout surely.
But I would not recommend doing a full chip just for a resume boost, this is going to be months of work and thousands of euros, so you will need some very strong internal motivation to hang on. Only doing it if you also find it fascinating and like the idea of spending thousands of hours working on this project.