Once a week, in NYU’s engineering classrooms, an eclectic mix of chemistry, computer science, and medical students gather together to learn how to design their very own microchips.

Microchips are the brains behind everyday electronic devices such as phones, computers, and home appliances—each one containing billions of components that perform complex computations at lightning speed. Specialized microchips offer even more. These custom-made chips can accelerate scientific simulations in chemistry, biology, and materials science, and advance machine learning and AI.

Designing these custom-application chips hasn’t been for everyone though—traditionally, it’s been a task for highly trained engineers. Also, the high cost of proprietary design tools and intellectual property licenses has made the process of chip design largely inaccessible to small start-up companies and academic researchers—let alone students. And chip design is hard: It can take nearly a thousand engineers to build a complex chip like a GPU.

“The chip design cycle is also probably one of the most complicated engineering processes that exists in the world,” said Institute Professor Siddharth Garg (ECE). “There’s a saying that rocket science is hard, but chip design is harder.”