We design chips and send them to a fab.
ICARUS is a group of Imperial College London students. We learn digital, analogue and mixed-signal chip design. We enter competitions such as Tiny Tapeout, where organisers manufacture our designs on a shared chip.
Fabs use yellow light in lithography rooms to keep blue and UV light off the photoresist. This page borrows the warm tone.
Members work on real designs in three areas.
You write hardware in Verilog and SystemVerilog and test your design in simulation. Synthesis and place-and-route then turn your code into a layout for fabrication.
always @(posedge clk)
if (rst) q <= 0;
else q <= q + 1;You size transistors, simulate circuits such as amplifiers and oscillators, and draw the layout by hand.
We submit designs to student competitions such as Tiny Tapeout. Tiny Tapeout puts many small designs on one shared chip, which keeps the cost of each design low.
A tapeout is the final design file you send to a fab. After you send the file, you cannot change the chip.
ICARUS has no completed projects yet. We plan to compete in the two events below.
We plan to compete. The team and tools will be listed here when they are set.
We plan to compete. The timeline will be listed here once we confirm it.
Join to learn RTL, analogue design and the chip design flow on a real project.
Your support pays for tapeouts, software licences and hardware.
Employers of Imperial graduates see what our members build and which tools they use.
ICARUS has no public contact address yet. We will add one here.