We need to make sure we can package the IC after the wafer has been diced into individual dies.

A common way of packaging ICs is to connect them to a leadframe by bonding tiny wires between the leads of the leadframe and the pads on the die.

The big bond pads around the outside of the IC often include ESD protection diodes, Input/Output drivers and so on.

This picture shows raven, an IC from Efabless. You can see around the edge there are the big bond pads and the power and ground lines. This structure is called a padring.

The padring used in the Google shuttle is included in Caravel.

Course feedback

For a very long time I’ve been fascinated by ASICs and have been close to them in my professional life as well, but not really as much into the detail as I would want. It’s been a fascination since grad school at least, so I've been interested in seeing more open source alternatives crop up, and now with the skywater PDK and OpenLane it seemed like the right time. It’s still a bit hard to get the motivation to get started, it feels like a bit of a hurdle so when I saw this course I just jumped right on it. It felt like a perfect way to get started.

Klas Nordmark (digital course)