#1096 overall
ECE 5745 Complex Digital ASIC Design
Cornell University
1 recommender · 1 thread · recommended in 1 year, 2017 · score 0.7
ECE 5745 is a Cornell University course on complex digital ASIC design, covering the flow from hardware description in an HDL through to a GDSII layout file suitable for a foundry.
One commenter points to it as a good online course explaining the full ASIC process from RTL to GDSII, alongside Berkeley and MIT courses.
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Regarding the ASIC part: There are several good courses online that explain the whole process from hardware description in a hardware description language to GDSII file, which you could send to a foundry in some detail. See for example this course https://web.csl.cornell.edu/courses/ece5745/, there are also very good courses available from Berkeley and MIT. What is usually missing is the more gory details of the backend flow, which can become very involved and complicated depending on your design and process.
Unfortunately someone who has no access to the EDA tools by cadence / synopsis or standard library files from foundries, cannot really follow along all that far, you are limited to working at the RTL level.
There are several good open source RTL simulators available, I have personally used mostly verilator, which supports (almost) all synthesizable constructs of system verilog and has performance close to the best commercial simulators like vcs. It compiles your design to C++ code which you can then wrap in any way you like.
You should also check out https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/, which is a hardware description language embedded in scala, the nice thing about it is that it has a relatively large number of high quality open source examples, designs (https://github.com/freechipsproject/rocket-chip) and a library of standard components available, something which can't really be said of verilog / vhdl unfortunately. As an added bonus you can actually use IntelliJ as an IDE, which blows any of the commercial IDEs available for system verilog or vhdl out of the water.
Another thing I can recommend is to get yourself a cheap FPGA board, some of them are programmable purely with open source tools, see http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/. Alternatively the Arty Devkit comes with a license for the Xilinx Vivado toolchain.