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Comment by throwaway613834 | Hacker News Reader

Huh, this is hard to swallow. What digital EE courses did you take in school?

Fair point, I had one class called logic design. It was my favorite, although I hated breadboarding 7400 logic.

The class was mainly Boolean algebra with some flip flops thrown in at some point. If I recall correctly that was my sophomore year.

There was next to no digital in my courses. Heavy on math and analog circuits. I think that one class on digital logic was it.

Digital logic was also one of my favorite classes. Really fun to think about some of the problems.

> Fair point, I had one class called logic design. The class was mainly Boolean algebra with some flip flops thrown in at some point.

Yeah that explains it. :-) So nothing about writing Verilog, feedback pipelining, adder design, clock skew, and stuff like that? Because those are the kinds of things I'd expect in a digital logic course (if one were available) and I would be shocked if you didn't need to know those concepts for a job in ASIC design.

Nope. Well, I’m sure we learned simple adders, again...Boolean algebra.

Everything else I learned on the job. If I had gone into board design, I’m sure a lot more would have been relevant.

Many places the chip designer is also the board designer, but sadly that is not the case here.

CE/EE departments sometimes offer an undergraduate VLSI intro course where you learn the theory from a textbook like Weste and Harris and get to design and tape-out your own chip via the Cadence or Synopsys tools and then fab it through an MPW service like MOSIS or CMP. So, it's certainly possible to learn some hands-on chip design fundamentals in school, but if your department doesn't offer it, you're pretty much out of luck. You could do your own extracurricular MPW run of a small design for maybe a thousand dollars, but you'll be stuck with SCMOS cell libraries and free tools like Magic or Electric, which aren't representative of industry.

We've got all that in an Advanced Digital Design course, but you have to be pretty far down a class path to take it so most students don't.

Honestly I’m jealous of what is taught these days.

But until the stuff I was being taught became practical (because it paid for dinner), I wasn’t really able to retain much once I had finished a class. So I don’t think it would have mattered time much if I had learned about clock skew in college. I’d have forgotten about its importance the next semester anyway.

Information without relevance is hard to maintain.

> We've got all that in an Advanced Digital Design course, but you have to be pretty far down a class path to take it

How far down? I wouldn't expect it to be popular but I also wouldn't expect it to have a long prereq chain (a sophomore-level course on computer architecture seems enough?)... it doesn't seem like analog which is where you actually need a long prereq chain to get anywhere.

> so most students don't

Most students... in EE? Or most students planning to do digital design after graduation?

Take me back to K-maps and XOR gates. At the time I remember struggling with them, but now I look back on the experience fondly.

I've had the same thing said to me by my professor about FPGAs. You can't really find much about current EE practices because companies just don't give them away or blog like the software guys do.

Textbooks tend to be very general (also old) and don't focus on the tooling used which is the bulk of the work you have to do.

Tooling changes (very) regularly. Learning concepts and techniques is far better for the long term since many of those techniques/concepts can be applied to new situations.

Also skeptical of this one. Tooling seems kind of beside the point? It's like arguing that your school taught you Python and that didn't prepare you for Java (or whatever).

Bulk of the work is done in simulation and verification with FPGAs.

This is true, but those tools doesn’t change that often at a given company. VCS and questa probably cover 99% of the fpga market.

That's exactly my point. You don't get access to those tools in school unless you are in an excellent graduate program AFAIK if that.

The simulation I can do in Vivado is apparently nothing compared to the scale those tools take it to. I've talked to someone in the industry that they told me Vivado's simulation is only okay for beginner projects.

Tooling is most definitely not beside the point. And if your focus is backend, that is what you spend most of your time on.

> Tooling is most definitely not beside the point. And if your focus is backend, that is what you spend most of your time on.

The question isn't what you spend your time on though. It's what is worth spending time teaching/learning in school. You also spend all your time using a mouse and keyboard but (hopefully) you don't take courses to learn how to use the mouse and the keyboard in school. If most people could pick it up in a short period of time on the job then it doesn't seem a worthwhile use of time to teach in a course.

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