Learn Chip Design: from breadboards to FPGA to your own ASIC chip
Maker Faire Bay Area 2026
September 25th-27th
When many people see an FPGA board, their question is: “Is this an Arduino? Is this a Raspberry Pi?” Not really. Arduino is a microcontroller board and RPi carries an embedded microprocessor. Here we have a board with an FPGA: Field Programmable Gate Array, which in most cases does not have a fixed CPU core inside, although you can build your own version of an Arduino microcontroller inside an FPGA.
The structure of a chip in Arduino or RPi is fixed at the silicon foundry. FPGA allows to form a digital circuit on the fly. It is essentially a matrix of cells with changeable function. One cell can become AND, another OR, yet another - one bit of memory. An FPGA does not contain a fixed CPU, but can be configured to work as a CPU. FPGA allows you to build your own CPU without a bunch of discrete components and wires.
We use FPGAs to train the future ASIC logic designers. ASIC is an acronym for Application Specific Integrated Circuit. But in plain words ASICs are the chips you see everywhere: in smartphones, computers, AI hardware accelerators, game consoles, automotive and space electronics.
Verilog Meetup
Verilog Meetup is a club at Hacker’s Dojo in Silicon Valley and an online community. We develop materials to improve teaching electronics to a wide audience: from middle school to university students to graduates preparing for job interviews. We start with venerable small-scale integration circuits on breadboards, continue with SystemVerilog and FPGA boards, and finally provide exercises on RTL (Register Transfer Level) and microarchitecture on job interview level. We also created a path to convert your FPGA-based designs into your own ASIC chip using TinyTapeout infrastructure. Most recently, we integrated three RISC-V cores into our FPGA example infrastructure that already supports 45 boards and four toolchains (Xilinx, Altera, Gowin, and Yosys/open-source-based).
