Gemini chip: An Apple-supported image enhancement chip

Amiel and Eitan Gorbonos, twins and students at the Technion, developed a chip to remove noise from images. The project, which was conducted with the support of Apple at the Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was directed by the laboratory engineer Goel Samuel.

In recent years, Apple has been funding student projects in the VLSI lab at the faculty, and this is to provide students with an opportunity to experience the process as it is in the industry - from concept to design to testing the physical chip after its manufacture.

Dalia Haim, Director of the Silicon Group at Apple Israel, explains that Apple's involvement is intended to expose the students to the enormous potential in the field of hardware and thus develop the next generation of chip engineers.

The new chip developed by the students is designed to filter image noise. The students started with the general design (architecture) of the chip. The chip was manufactured according to the plan at the factory and returned to the Technion for testing. It was the first digital chip in the VLSI lab to be manufactured using the TSMC65 VLSI chip manufacturing process.