Silicon Chip Design & Semiconductor Engineering

Learn next-level VLSI design skills for top Silicon Valley companies

UCSC Silicon Valley Extension Silicon Chip Design & Semiconductor Engineering professional certificate program provides students with the core design skills they need to work at top companies in the Valley. Both established and aspiring engineers develop new skills, gain insight into digital and analog design techniques and methodologies, and learn from our expert faculty.

Integrated circuit curriculum

You'll explore ASIC, semiconductor, EDA, device, and integrated circuits. In our VLSI lab, our instructors will give you the opportunity to get hands-on experience with hardware specification, logic design, verification, synthesis, physical implementation, circuit design, integrated circuit product testing, and the latest EDA tools on Linux.

Two tailored elective tracks

• Track 1: Front-end Design
  For professionals pursuing careers in application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) architectural definitions and logic designs for its implementation.
• Track 2: Back-end Design
  For professionals interested in the physical implementations of ASIC designs from synthesis to silicon.

Certificate program objectives

• Implement Verilog modeling of digital logic
• Write assertions for formal verification using SystemVerilog
• Build an advanced UVM verification environment
• Understand and implement DFT concepts in an ASIC design
• Complete practical designs with Xilinx FPGAs
• Implement a design from RTL to GDS

Access to premier tools

Using premier industry tools from Cadence, OpenROAD, Siemens, and Synopsys, you’ll learn front-end and back-end ASIC design and leave the classroom ready to apply new skills at your job.