Matt Venn's SiliWiz, the Silicon Wizard, Aims to Drop the Barrier to Entry in Chip Design

Chip designer and FPGA programmer Matt Venn has released a tool, developed with colleague Uri Shaked, which he hopes will make it easy for anyone to design their own electronic chips, regardless of experience: SiliWiz, the silicon wizard.

"SiliWiz will help you get a basic understanding of how semiconductors work and are manufactured at a fundamental level," Venn explains of the project, which was created as an educational tool alongside the Zero to ASIC course. "Semiconductors are the most important technology of the 21st century but only a tiny fraction of us know how they work or are designed and made."

Usable entirely in-browser, SiliWiz offers a look at the actual layers of material which are built up to create modern, albeit simplified, silicon dice. At its most basic, it's a drawing tool — but rather than ink on paper you're applying metal and dopants to silicon, building a circuit line by line.

Under the hood, SiliWiz uses a SPICE simulator to turn what you've drawn into a functional circuit — and even applies design rules checking (DRC) to see if a chip would actually be suitable for manufacturing. That's not just for show, either: Venn developed SiliWiz for use in his Tiny Tapeout program, which offers new chip designers a low-cost route to having physical chips produced and shipped.

Key to SiliWiz is its accessibility. Where professional tools are expensive, complex, and usually require the user to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), SiliWiz is accessible to all. A companion tutorial, designed for those aged around 14 and up, introduces the core concepts in around three hours, Venn promises.

While it may feel like a toy, SiliWiz aims to provide a stepping-stone to take someone with zero experience of working at such a low level to where they could, if it proves interesting enough, consider participating in the OpenMPW program — a Google-funded initiative in which open source chip designs are built free of charge, on Skywater or GlobalFoundries process nodes and with open process design kits (PDKs).

SiliWiz is now available to use on the official website, with the source code published to GitHub under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.