The useful part of an ASIC bootcamp is not another RTL exercise. It is forcing design choices to survive synthesis, physical design, fabrication, packaging, and a bench measurement. eInfochips has put multi-university student teams through that complete loop on one TSMC 28nm test chip, turning training from a collection of tool demos into a shared silicon delivery process.
Students implemented blocks including FIR filters and RISC-V CPUs, then eInfochips handled IP selection, RTL-to-GDSII implementation, signoff, packaging, and boards for lab validation. The shared die matters because each team's block must meet a common set of interfaces and physical constraints. Coordination failures become observable in silicon instead of disappearing when a semester project ends at simulation.
Universities that teach chip design should budget for one fabricated, packaged, bench-tested artifact per cohort, even if several schools share the die. A program that stops at GDSII trains tool users. A program that closes the loop trains engineers who can make a ship decision.