WLCSP
This package is very small and cheap to produce. It also has benefits due to the lack of bond wires. Bond wires increase parasitic inductance, and can be a problem for high speed designs.
The downside is that they are very tiny!
The last 5 layers of the Skywater PDK define the layers necessary to build the WLCSP package.
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.