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Details on the ETH Zurich open source ASICs can be found here:

https://github.com/open-source-eda-birds-of-a-feather/open-s...

Presented at DAC 2025

Is it even possible to design serious ASICs without expensive tooling?

For some definitions of serious, sure. The main critical piece that’s missing is all the testing infrastructure. Buying 100 or so ASICs for university use is one thing. Buying 100K, or more, is another.

Not the gdb support via jtag that software engineers need, they have that. But the various manufacturing test suites, which do modify gate netlists, and automated circuit characterization techniques that electrical engineers and the manufacturing engineers use.

From the slides, they are reducing the gap, it's not there yet.

But I was actually pleasantly surprised by how close they are.

This course is actually mandatory in the first year of the CS undergraduate program here at ETH. I remember it very fondly for its great (and passionate) lecture and the hands on experience building a MIPS cpu in the exercise sessions. Probably the best lecture in my undergraduate.

This is also the university that develops RumbleDB[0]. It uses JSONiq as its query language which is such a pleasure to work with. It's useful for dealing with data lakes, though I've only experimented with it because of JSONiq.

[0] https://github.com/RumbleDB/rumble

Onur Mutlu also posts his (great) lectures to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@OnurMutluLectures

The link for this course's playlist is posted on the page.

Broadening the perspective here. Has anyone curated a complete computer science / computer engineering curriculum here with classes that are essentially “best of breed” on YouTube?

Does anyone know how this course compares to the NAND2Tetris course?

You can check out Onur Mutlu's videos on YouTube. I'd say it is much more demanding than NAND2Tetris.

Crazy how successful the ETH open source designs were. The pop up in lots of places.

https://www.topuniversities.com/world-university-rankings

ETH is at 7

Not too shabby for such a tiny country.