The University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Department of Physics and Astronomy has received supplemental support from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science for Professor Keisuke Yoshihara to begin a new research effort on open-source application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) or “readout chips” for high-energy physics instrumentation and readout.
The project, titled “Feasibility Study of an Open-Source Mixed-Signal ASIC,” will explore whether modern open-source design tools and foundry access can be used to develop compact, low-power, mixed-signal ASICs for detector front-end readout. Such chips are essential for future particle physics experiments, where detector systems must process fast signals with high precision, low noise, and limited power.
This effort continues a long tradition of ASIC development at UH initiated by the late Prof. Gary Varner, whose group developed custom waveform-sampling chips such as IRSX and TARGET-X. Building on this legacy, the new project aims to demonstrate that similar ideas can now be pursued using open-source tools and more accessible and affordable fabrication paths.
Open-source ASIC technology is rapidly growing in Europe, Japan, and the United States. Unlike traditional ASIC development, which often depends on proprietary tools, restrictive licenses, and limited file sharing, open-source approaches allow collaborative design, external review, and reuse across institutions. These features are especially well-suited to academic fields such as high-energy physics, where detector electronics are often developed by distributed university and laboratory teams.
The project will be led by Prof. Keisuke Yoshihara, who joined UH Physics and Astronomy as a faculty member in 2024. His group will expand into mixed-signal ASIC design while building on expertise in detector instrumentation, firmware, FPGA-based real-time processing, and intelligent readout systems. The effort will also benefit from advisory support from Prof. Boris Murmann in the UH Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, a leading expert in mixed-signal integrated circuit design and open-source ASIC education.
As a proof of concept, the UH team will design, fabricate, and test a one-channel mixed-signal waveform digitizer ASIC with fast waveform sampling, on-chip analog-to-digital conversion, and FPGA-based readout. The goal is not only to build a working chip, but also to establish a reusable design methodology that can be scaled toward future multi-channel detector readout ASICs.
The project will support the training of a Ph.D. student in ASIC design, simulation, layout, fabrication, and bench testing, helping build local expertise at UH in a field increasingly important for next-generation particle physics experiments.
“This is a timely opportunity to build on UH’s history in custom chip development while taking advantage of the new open-source ASIC ecosystem,” said Yoshihara. “If successful, this approach could make advanced chip design more accessible to university groups and enable broader collaboration across the high-energy physics community.”
The project is supported as a supplement to the University of Hawai‘i High-Energy Physics program funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.
