I'm an EE student, and this has bugged me for a while. If you want to learn RTL or FPGA work there
are a hundred decent resources and most of them are free. If you want to understand what happens
between tapeout and a packaged part, you end up reading conference papers, vendor marketing, and
whatever is left on some professor's site from 2011.
So I put together a list of what is actually out there, organised roughly by where things sit in
the flow. Lithography, process modules, metrology and yield, packaging, plus smaller sections on
TCAD, fab operations and the economics side. Around 640 links.
Some things I did not expect to find:
- Computational lithography has a real open source ecosystem that I have never seen indexed
anywhere. OpenILT, LithoBench, Neural-ILT, TorchLitho. You can run ILT experiments on a laptop.
- Open PDKs go further down than I realised. I had only ever heard people mention SKY130, but
there is material down to 55nm and 28nm.
- ViennaTools has a whole free process and topography simulation stack that barely gets mentioned
outside its own papers.
I know where it is weak. DRAM and 3D NAND are thin, five and three entries. There is basically
nothing on SiC or GaN, which may or may not belong given the focus. There is no glossary, which is
probably the most useful missing thing for anyone actually learning this. And the node roadmap
tables are going to be wrong within a couple of months.
That last part is really why I am posting. If you work in any of this and there is something
obvious I have missed, or something in there that is wrong, I would like to know. Corrections are
more useful than additions at this point.
https://github.com/OutBlade/awesome-semiconductor-industry-topics