How deep the work goes
A family comparing programmes needs to know what level of work the student actually does, because “my child made a chip” can mean anything from colouring in a template to a measured piece of research. We use the four levels below, and we say which weeks reach which level.
| What the student actually does | What it shows | Where YSRP reaches it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Follows a kit completes a given circuit or modifies an example | Knows the tools and the basic flow. A worthwhile introduction, and the level most youth electronics stops at. | Weeks 1–4, as the foundation only |
| 2 · Designs and debugs chooses a function, describes the hardware, simulates, fixes it | Real engineering ability: the student made the design decisions and can explain them. | Weeks 5–8. Every YSRP student reaches this level with their own project |
| 3 · Investigates poses a question, compares designs, measures performance, power or resources, explains the result | Research and engineering enquiry. This is what science-fair judges and journal reviewers evaluate. | Weeks 9–12 and after the silicon returns; the outcomes pack is built around this level |
| 4 · Fabricates and tests submits the design, receives the chip, measures silicon against simulation | A complete implementation experience. The chip is evidence, and its research value still depends on the originality and verification of levels 2 and 3. | Week 13 and the return of silicon, for every student |
Having a chip in hand is not by itself high-level research; what makes it research is the question, the comparison and the measurement at level 3, which the chip then proves at level 4. YSRP is built so that every student reaches level 2 with their own design and level 4 with their own silicon, and so that the outcomes pack and the research track take a student as far into level 3 as their work allows.
Who does what: the student, the mentor and the AI
Competitions and journals require that a project be the student’s own work with help disclosed, and admissions readers ask the same question in their own way. The division below is written into the programme and generated into each student’s disclosure statement from the Studio’s records.
| Who | Does | Does not |
|---|---|---|
| The student | Chooses the question; makes every design decision; writes the hardware description or assembles it from verified blocks; runs and reads the simulations; records decisions and failures in the notebook; measures the prototype and the chip; writes the design document and, for competitions, the research plan, abstract and poster. | Receive a design to copy; have documents written for them. |
| The mentor (an engineer from the group’s Taipei team) | Reviews, questions, points out what is missing, signs off the design for fabrication, and is named in the disclosure statement. | Design the student’s circuit or fix it for them. |
| The AI assistant (inside the YSRP Studio) | Explains concepts and error reports; generates test vectors from the student’s data; runs the tools; asks why before it helps; records every exchange for the disclosure statement. | Design for the student; write competition documents (the 2027 ISEF rules do not allow it, and neither do we). |
The research programme
MTRI, the group’s research institute, runs a research programme alongside YSRP, led from its Singapore campus with a focus on human–AI interaction and learning. It studies four questions:
- How does working with an AI assistant on a hands-on hardware project build a young person’s ability to frame a problem, and how does that ability transfer?
- What kind of AI scaffolding keeps authorship and understanding with the student rather than quietly taking over, and how can that be measured?
- How does a young person’s mental model of “a chip” form when the design target is silicon rather than code, and what block granularity gives creative freedom without losing them?
- What learning outcomes does the programme produce at school scale, compared with a conventional electronics or coding course?
Methods are the ordinary ones of the field: co-design workshops with students, pilot studies, and cohort studies with pre- and post-measures, using interaction logs, notebooks and the artefacts themselves. Participation in research is separate from participation in the programme: it needs the parent’s separate consent, can be withdrawn at any time without affecting the student’s place, and uses de-identified data. Results are published whether or not they favour the programme, in peer-reviewed venues in human–computer interaction, machine learning, natural-language processing and engineering education, and summarised on this page as they appear. This research connects to the group’s Mobility Capital work: knowledge, judgement and opportunity, studied at the scale of a first project.
The YSRP Studio: what it is, and what it is built on
The YSRP Studio is Magellan Global’s AI-assisted design-automation platform for young designers, built by Magellan Silicon, the group’s semiconductor engineering team in Taipei, with MTRI. It runs in a browser and carries the whole flow: design entry (verified blocks for beginners, hardware description for those ready for it), simulation, verification checks, FPGA programming, the pre-fabrication checks each shuttle requires, a fabrication tracker and measurement reports when the silicon returns, plus the engineering notebook, the disclosure statement and the project page.
Underneath, the Studio uses the open-source toolchain the industry’s open-silicon community has proven on thousands of designs: Yosys for synthesis, Verilator for simulation, OpenROAD and LibreLane for layout, Magic and KLayout for design-rule checks, and open process design kits on 130–180 nm processes (IHP’s SG13G2 and SkyWater’s 130 nm through partner shuttles). No commercial EDA licence is involved anywhere a student works, which is what makes the platform affordable for families and schools in any country; commercial sign-off tools enter only if and when the group opens its own education shuttle with a Taiwanese foundry, and never on the student’s side.
The Studio is built in stages. The first cohorts use the browser edition. Next comes a visual, game-like design mode in which younger students assemble and test logic as naturally as building in a sandbox game, with the same path to silicon underneath. Then a schools edition a teacher can run, and an open registry of silicon-verified student designs that later cohorts can build on. The platform is the group’s long-term investment in making chip design something young people anywhere can do, and the research programme above is what tells us whether each stage works.
Alongside school
YSRP is designed to sit beside a full school programme, not replace it, and it supplies the mentors, tools and fabrication so that a family does not have to assemble those resources itself. The time commitment is about four hours a week for twelve weeks, plus about ten hours for the outcomes pack after the chip returns. No subject is a prerequisite beyond basic programming; the subjects below make the project richer, and the project in turn gives those subjects somewhere to go. A letter describing the programme is available for schools, and we work with a school’s own science or research teacher where one is involved.
| School system | How YSRP fits | Subjects that support the project (none required) |
|---|---|---|
| A-Level / IB / local systems in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan | About four hours a week for twelve weeks, online, outside school hours; cohorts timed around examination seasons where possible. | Mathematics, Further Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science; IB Physics and Mathematics AA |
| US and Canadian high schools | Fits a semester; the fair season after the silicon returns aligns with regional fairs in the following spring. | Algebra II / Pre-calculus, Physics, AP Computer Science or Physics C |
| Middle school (ages 12–13) | The same twelve weeks with a smaller project and a mentor who checks pace weekly. | Interest in building things; Scratch or Python or a robotics platform |
What YSRP is not
- Not a kit. Kits teach assembly; YSRP teaches design, and the chip that returns contains the student’s own design.
- Not a guarantee. No award, publication or admission is promised; eligibility for every competition depends on age, where the student studies and the organiser’s rules, and we map it before dates are fixed.
- Not a substitute for school science. It is a project that uses what school teaches.
- Not a finance or trading course. The worked example uses market data because it makes latency easy to understand; the rules in it are an input, no claim is made that they make money, and no student trades.
- Not an AI that designs for the student. The assistant explains, checks, records and asks why; the student designs.