Explore
The learning side of Chipbase: interactive ways to build intuition before (and between) the graded problems. Everything here runs in your browser - no installs, no accounts.
The methods and algorithms of every flow stage, cataloged and made interactive. Watch Lee's wavefront flood a routing grid, race it against A* (A-star), Hadlock, and Soukup in the maze lab, and read sixty years of routing ideas from line search to negotiated congestion.
The fab's side of physical design: what a PDK (Process Design Kit) contains, how transistors and the metal stack changed shape as they shrank, why lithography sets the router's rules, and how corners, variation, and reliability define sign-off. Ends with the open PDKs this platform runs on.
Fast-feedback drills that make the knowledge stick: command flash cards with spaced repetition, log forensics (why did my run die?), metric over/under guessing, and spot-the-layout-pathology.
Follow a real design through the whole flow, stage by stage: annotated snapshots of an actual OpenROAD run, from synthesized netlist to routed layout, with the metrics explained at every step.