
## 2023 SSCS “PICO” Open-Source Chipathon
### – Submission deadline: May 1, 2023 –

The IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society is pleased to announce its third open-source integrated circuit (IC) design contest under the umbrella of its [PICO](https://sscs.ieee.org/about/solid-state-circuits-directions/sscs-pico-program) Program (Platform for IC Design Outreach). While this contest is open to any individual or team, we encourage the participation of pre-college students, undergraduates, and geographical regions that are underrepresented within the IC design community.

The goal of this chipathon is to bring together IC design newbies, enthusiasts and experienced mentors to benefit from the collaboration opportunities enabled by the rapidly growing open-source IC design movement. In contrast to previous chipathon editions (which were open-ended), this year’s goal is to create a specific set of building blocks that can be re-used to benefit the community as a whole.

The design target (depicted in the graphic below) is a “lab bench on a chip” system that can be used to characterize basic analog circuit blocks through oscilloscope and waveform generator functionality. Participants are requested to submit innovative ideas on how these blocks should be implemented. A jury will select the best proposals (submitted as Jupyter notebooks) to assemble a collection of teams that will work together toward tapeout. We anticipate tapeouts of several candidate designs toward the end of the year, targeting GlobalFoundries’ [GF180MCU technology](https://gf180mcu-pdk.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).

<img src="figures/overview.png" width="400"/>
