A shuttle service is the same as a multi project wafer.

On 30th June 2020, Tim Ansell announced the collaboration between Google and Skywater to provide a free shuttle service in his FOSSI dialup talk.

These slides taken from his talk show the overview:

Chip Foundry Shuttle

Normally in an MPW you would have the whole die to yourself. In the ChipFoundry Shuttle all the designs will be within the user project area of the Caravel harness.

Caravel has its own RISCV processor and a neat datasheet. The idea here is to make it easier to bring up and debug your designs at the cost of some area.

Read this post to find out what you could fit in the user space.

The Google shuttle returned chips in type of packaging called Wafer Level Chip Scale Packaging and then the easier to handle QFN.

Course feedback

I can highly recommend the Zero to ASIC course, especially to other students. Thanks to the grant program I was able to get a Silicon Level ticket and actually fabricate my own chip. It was a great opportunity to take something I learned at university in my case, Huffman coding and implement it in real silicon. The course made the whole process understandable and achievable.

Marvin B (digital course)