Fast-turn IC prototyping for university education and research

The Massachussetts Microelectronics Center (M²C) has recently completed the start-up of an IC fabrication facility for use by its eleven member universities. The primary mission of this facility is to produce prototypes of student-designed full-custom CMOS ICs on a fast-turn basis (i.e. 4 weeks or less), in order for students to test circuits they have designed within the normal time-frame of university courses. The M²C fabrication facility is fundamentally different from a traditional high-volume manufacturing operation. Although many different designs are produced, the quantity of chips needed for any given design is quite small. The facility´s critical measure of performance is cycle time, but because of cost constraints, it has minimal equipment redundancy and a very small engineering and production staff, compared to normal industry standards. A comprehensive operational strategy has been implemented to address this challenge, and packaged chips from recent multiproject wafer lots have been returned to students as quickly as 13 calendar days after design submission