I’m currently pursuing my undergrad in electrical engineering, and I’ve been trying to explore niches that appeal to me so I can figure out what exactly I want to do with my career. One area that’s currently got my interest is analog IC design. It seems like it could offer the type of low abstraction problem solving I tend to like.

Unfortunately it’s pretty inaccessible. Most people don’t get to make an IC (AKA ‘tape out’) until they’re in a graduate program pursuing their masters or PHD. That’s a couple years away for me, and I don’t want to wait that long. So I’m gonna make one now.

The way I see it, there’s three main issues standing in my way:

  1. Making an IC is expensive
  2. I know jack shit about making analog ICs.
  3. I’m a pretty busy person, and this could take a lot of time

I thought of this project for the first time when I ran into TinyTapeout. They’re a business which crowdfunds production runs of ICs. For just a couple hundred dollars you can buy a tile on their chip and use the on-chip multiplexer to select your design. For a 2x2 analog tile IC with a couple pins, it’s gonna run me $700. That’s still a tough cost for a college student but definitely feasible. So there it is: I can afford my own tapeout (and you can too!) Now how am I going to actually make this thing?

I did some research and found a good looking textbook, Design of Analog CMOS Integrated Circuits by Behzad Razavi. People had a lot of praise for it online, so I figured if I went through this thing a little every day, and finished by the end of December, that’d give me 3 months to design an IC before TinyTapeout’s shuttle deadline in March. And I thought that seemed like a pretty decent plan.

So late October I did the math and realized I could finish that whole text book by January if I went through just 13 pages every day. Sounds easy right? Yeah that’s what I thought too. This stuff is dense. Some days it takes me 5-6 hours to go through those pages (one day it took me 10!) But my God has it worked. Before I started this, I didn’t even know how a MOSFET worked, let alone a whole op-amp. Now I’m definitely no expert, but I’m feeling pretty comfortable at the prospect of designing my own op-amp or bandgap reference.

The astute among you may have noticed I claimed to be busy, and yet somehow spend up to 10 hours studying this textbook every day. What gives? Well for starters, anything greater than 5 hours is pretty rare. Most days I can knock my pages out in around 3-4 hours. But I definitely didn’t have 3-4 spare hours with my schedule back in October. So I had to make time. Let’s not be too dramatic though. I just made two simple changes:

  1. I started getting up at 6-7am everyday.
  2. I got rid of Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, all the little distractions that were stealing my time.

And that was enough! This let me study my 13 pages every day first thing, and by skipping out on digital distractions, I’d made enough time to still do everything else I had to do. Combined with Pomodoro timers, I’d say I’m pretty efficient nowadays.

So that’s the plan! I’m going to keep studying this textbook everyday until I finish it on December 31st, and then I’m going to design an analog IC in 3 months. Of course I’ll post updates here as I move along. Wish me luck!