Campaign Update: Building Real Sensors with GF180MCU — See What's Possible!#

Hey everyone! 👋

As we get closer to our December 3rd tape-in deadline (that’s coming up fast!), I wanted to share something that really shows the power of what you can build with the GF180MCU process we’re pooling together.

Real Silicon, Real Applications#

Saligane’s group at the University of Michigan - now at Brown University - recently published a paper in IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine showing off an analog front-end (AFE) chip they designed entirely with open-source tools on GF180MCU. And it’s not just a test chip — they’re using it to read out flexible laser-induced graphene sensors for wearables!

(View high-resolution die photography on Silicon Prawn)

The chip integrates operational amplifiers, a 14-bit SAR ADC, and a capacitive DAC to create a complete sensor readout platform. They demonstrated it working with:

• Strain/flex sensors (detecting finger bending in real-time)
• Temperature sensors (tracking body temperature with 0.9989 R² accuracy)
• Multi-modal sensing (combining different sensor types on one platform)

The Open Source Flow Works!#

What’s exciting is they used the exact same open-source toolchain you have access to:

• XSchem for schematic capture
• Ngspice for simulation
• KLayout and Magic for layout
• Standard DRC/LVS checks

They’ve published their designs on GitHub in the OpenFASoC-Tapeouts repository, and the final submission is available on foss-eda-tools, which means you can actually look at exactly how they did it.

Reuse, Don’t Reinvent!#

This is where it gets really interesting for your designs. The OpenFASoC project provides building blocks you can directly reuse:

• Folded-cascode OPAMP with programmable bias for noise/power trade-offs
• 14-bit SAR ADC (asynchronous, monotonic switching)
• Bootstrapper and switch circuits for high-performance sampling
• Comparator circuits (double-tail latch and StrongArm topologies)

You can literally take their GDSII files, study their layout techniques, and adapt their circuits for your own sensor applications. Need to read out a resistive sensor? Temperature probe? Custom transducer? The hard work of building reliable analog blocks is already done.

What Could You Build?#

Think about applications like:

• Environmental monitoring devices
• Biomedical wearables
• Industrial sensor nodes
• Custom instrumentation
• IoT edge devices with analog sensing

With GF180MCU’s 5 metal layers, MIM capacitors, multiple resistor types, and mixed-signal capabilities, you have everything needed for serious analog and mixed-signal designs.

Get Inspired, Get Building#

Check out the full paper to see detailed schematics, measurement results, and their complete design flow. This is real silicon, designed with open tools, doing real work — exactly what we’re enabling with this pooled run.

Questions about the campaign or getting started with GF180MCU? Hit reply or join our community discussions!

- Tim “mithro” Ansell

P.S. — If you haven’t reserved your slot yet, head over to buy.wafer.space before November 28th. After that, you’ll be waiting for Run 2!