This quarter, I introduced Brain-Inspired Machine Learning as a course to University of California, Santa Cruz. And while machine learning is cool and all, it’s only as good as the hardware it runs on.

31 students & first time chip designers all took the lead on building DRC/LVS clean neuromorphic circuits. Students came from grad & undergrad backgrounds across various corners of the university. ECE, CSE, Math, Computational Media, Bioengineering, Psychology, etc. Many had never even taken an ECE 101 class, and started learning from scratch 2 weeks ago.

Their designs are now all being manufactured together in the Sky130 Process. Each design is compiled onto the same piece of silicon with TinyTapeout, thanks to Matt Venn and Uri Shaked.

We spent Friday night grinding in my lab while blaring metalcore tunes. All students managed to clear all checks. The final designs do a heap of cool things like accelerate sparse matrix-multiplies, event denoising, to simulating reservoir networks. I naturally had to squeeze in a Hodgkin-Huxley neuron in the 6 hours before the deadline (pictured).

Not sure if it’s the cost of living, or the mountain lions on campus, but damn. UCSC students have some serious grit.