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.
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.
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.
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?