Every electronic system needs a heartbeat. In our capstone project, we are building that heartbeat directly by designing, fabricating, and characterizing a small but foundational circuit block: an on-chip oscillator, which generates a steady repeating electrical signal. Our core technical goal is to produce a working oscillator that can be reliably brought up and measured on real hardware, then use those measurements to iteratively refine the design over the semester.
This project will be a close collaboration with the CMU Hacker Fab team and is intended to set a precedent for what repeatable, mixed-signal building blocks can look like. To our knowledge, a validated, reusable on-chip oscillator has not previously existed either in this capstone course or as a standard Hacker Fab reference design. Our end deliverable is therefore not just a one-off chip, but a course-ready handout: a proven design paired with a clear bring-up and testing workflow that future aspiring students and designers can reuse as a starting point.
For the demonstration, our minimum milestone is to show a stable oscillating waveform on an oscilloscope and integrate the chip with a simple PCB setup, such as using basic external components to flash an LED in an intuitive way. If our fabricated oscillator’s performance supports it, we will pursue a stretch demonstration where the oscillator serves as a timing reference source in a more applicable system-level application, including simple filtering or filter/receiver set-up. More broadly, oscillators are widely applicable across modern electronics, and by delivering the first functional, reproducible oscillator block in capstone and Hacker Fab, we hope to enable future teams and students to prototype faster and explore new applications that depend on a reliable timing reference.