BOSC – One Student One Chip Phase3

The third session of the “One Student One Chip” Initiative was officially launched on July 7, 2021. It strives to combine the training of processor chip design talents with the construction of an open source processor chip ecosystem, and cultivate both masters of knowledge in the field of processor chip architecture design. Professional talents who have experience in the entire process of processor chip design and manufacturing. The total number of applicants for the third session is 760, and participating students cover 168 domestic and foreign universities (including 30 foreign universities). According to statistics from the student’s perspective, among the number of applicants, there are 625 current students, accounting for 82%. At the same time, many graduated students are also interested in processor chip design. Among the students on campus, undergraduates, masters and doctoral students are distributed in all grades, of which 44% are undergraduates, 50% are master students, and 6% are masters and doctoral students. In terms of grade breakdown, the five grades with the most applicants are: first-year graduate students (27%), junior students (23%), second-year graduate students (14%), sophomore students (11%), and senior students (7%). Judging from the registration data, the third session of the “One Student One Chip” Initiative has officially entered the cross-regional large-scale talent training stage.In order to cope with the huge challenges in labor costs brought about by large-scale talent training, the project team tried for the first time to establish a set of teaching processes that “let students guide students”. Lecture Q&A, progress inspection, SoC integration verification and back-end physical design are all completed independently by the students. Engineers only participate in the inspection of the chip back-end in the final stage and make suggestions for improvement. This not only fundamentally solves the problem of imbalance between supply and demand of teachers, but also cultivates a group of TA teams with excellent technical skills and excellent psychological quality, laying a solid foundation for the subsequent development of the “One Student One Chip” Initiative. There are 27 front-end TAs in total, who are mainly responsible for preparing lecture notes and other auxiliary materials, organizing reports and answering questions, and following up on students’ learning progress. The SoC team has 4 people, mainly responsible for collecting processor codes submitted by students and performing SoC integration and post-integration verification work. The IC back-end team has a total of 5 people, mainly responsible for the physical design of the chip and generating a GDSII layout that can be taped out. With the support of the above process, the number of tape-out students in this session has reached more than 50.