artisanspam

Not denying that, but you previously claimed that “the largest portion of the company is related to the fab.” If you’re saying PTD PhDs are this “largest portion of the company” in terms of engineers, that makes no sense. Intel isn’t hiring more PhDs than Masters/Bachelor – there aren’t enough PhDs out there for that to ever happen.

The majority of Intel employees are directly related to the fab, but those employees are not mostly PhDs without many other job prospects.

I too am ex-Intel. The majority of employment opportunities are in the fab but that’s mostly manufacturing and technicians. It’s not mostly PhDs with no breadth knowledge which is what the original comment was seeming to imply.

The vast majority of engineers at Intel are not what you described. Most are CS/EE bachelors or masters that could go to dozens of other companies shipping hardware.

Looks great! But you may want to consider a different name as PCalc is already a popular calculator app:

https://pcalc.com/

Not even just that, but half of the content is just distracting GIFs. I can’t focus well on reading content when there are videos playing on the same screen. This is also a trend that needs to stop.

It would be nice if the website put the donation links below the demo images instead of having them be the first thing you see. That was a big turn off when I first loaded the page.

The Portland area has lost population in the past year, so many who are able to move are taking advantage of it. I am from Portland and will be moving in a few months mainly due to the lack of safety described in the article.

The thing I enjoy the most about these little free libraries is that they’re small, simple things that rid a neighborhood of the feeling of separation and loneliness. Anyone can set them up and anyone can use them. They’re community building and I love that.

And yet, I know that I personally would never use one. I use an e-reader and most of the books I’ve seen in them don’t intrigue me.

So does anyone know of any similar projects that can be used for community building? Something I find similar is the typewriter mailbox I learned of from a Strong Towns blog post: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/12/10/the-typewrite...

Unfortunately welding a typewriter to a mailbox isn’t as simple as buying or building a wooden box on a post.

This is the terrible norm in the semiconductor industry. VNCs everywhere. Almost all EDA GUIs are only designed for Red Hat or CentOS so IT makes everyone connect to a datacenter and start an X server. Having interviewed at/worked at these companies, I know that Intel, NVIDIA, and Apple all do this.

It sucks. Your productivity plummets because each keystroke lags and it makes you lose your train of thought. When there's an outage, no one can do any work at all.

Aside from what was already mentioned in another comment, one of the largest things lacking in this area is not having dedicated support. These tools are maintained by only a few individuals, and if you need a feature of bug fix, you either need to implement it yourself or wait a long time for a fix.

If you need a feature or bug fix from Cadence, Synopsys, or Mentor, I've usually had releases that fix the issue within a week or two.

The article seems to imply that EDA vendors contributing to a common open source project is where EDA ought to go moving forward. That's a step in the right direction because it'd fix this support issue I mention. But it probably won't fix the cost issue.

It depends on what tool licenses you're talking about. A single license for Questa is in the thousands of dollars range. But lots of VIPs or backend tools will be a lot more.

If you suggest using those tools for most industry semiconductor work you’ll be laughed out of the room. I wish it wasn’t the case, but these tools aren’t good enough for most industry use cases.

I hadn’t even brought up IP licensing but you’re right. That’s another order of magnitude of cost and it’s incredibly important.

I don't think that most software engineers understand how they good they have it with access to open source software. The most apt comparison I can think of to EDA is a mathematical computing environment (MATLAB, Mathematica, Maple, etc.) but an order of magnitude more constrained.

Everything in EDA is licensed. Simulators, emulators, synthesis, IDEs, formal verification, coverage, waveform viewers, and most post-silicon tools. You work with Intel/ARM? Any tools they make are licensed, too. You can't make CI/CD pipelines when you only have 3 $1000 compiler licenses for your whole company. Your JetBrains suite that costs $300/year for dozens of IDEs? It's not uncommon for HDL IDE licenses to be >$1000 for a single user.

Contrast that to most traditional software development, where the cost is solely in how much compute you're using.

I know that open-source EDA doesn't necessarily mean FOSS EDA, but that "free" part really is what's needed here.

I changed jobs last year because I was unhappy that I wasn't making enough money. These two things aren't completely unrelated.

As a Portlander, you might wanna rethink that plan if you think standard of living will go up by moving here.

This isn't a compiler. All this is is a build tool that calls compilers in the background. So benchmarks for this tool aren't really useful.

However, for benchmarks between actual FOSS SystemVerilog compiler front-ends (i.e. language parsing), I've found this[1] chart from CHIPS Alliance to be useful.

Some of the tools listed are parsing + synthesis (yosys) or front-end + simulator (icarus, verilator). Several are just parsers.

[1]: https://chipsalliance.github.io/sv-tests-results/

There are two validation engineers for every design engineer in the semiconductor industry. There are even fewer design architects. But they all need a computer engineering background. Design verification is just what’s in demand.

This[1] is the new bill in US congress that he mentioned about subsidies. The "E-BIKE" act. It's a tax credit of 30% of the cost of a new ebike. The credit can't exceed $1,500. This changes slightly if you file jointly, but you can just read the bill -- it's short.

The author makes it seem like this bill a part of Build Back Better which just passed the House and is in the Senate now. But that's not what the bill timeline says.

Personally, I'm waiting for this before I commit to a RadRunner Plus.

[1] - https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1019...

Lots of people are recommending Not Just Bikes on YouTube in this thread, which is great. In my mind, walkable urban design is a super important topic that people need to be on board with if we're to get ourselves out of this climate crisis. So here are a few related YouTube recommendations I've come across:

About Here (Specific to Vancouver, BC): https://www.youtube.com/c/AboutHere

Oh the Urbanity: https://www.youtube.com/c/OhTheUrbanity

City Beautiful: https://www.youtube.com/c/CityBeautiful

This[1] Pew Research article shows that, pre-pandemic, it was about a 50-50 split between car-centric + low-density and walkable + high-density living. It is now 60-40 due to the pandemic. I would bet that it goes back to 50-50 in a few years once the pandemic slows down.

So yes, there's almost an equal amount of demand for this type of housing.

[1]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/26/more-americ...

Sure it's capable, but there's certainly a cost of having to use multiple languages in your test bench/DUT. I'd argue that's one of the reasons why Verilator, CocoTB, Chisel, etc. haven't taken off in the "traditional" semiconductor industry (i.e. not FPGAs).

Nice, this works on iPad with Safari as well. At the very least, simple key binds work. Thanks!

I was hoping this would be the thing that makes coding on an iPad not awful. But any keyboard shortcuts are consumed by Safari, so it's a pain to use. However, I hope that this enables the VS Code team to make a native iOS/Android VS Code app that would essentially just be a web browser that uses this functionality.

While Verilog is not SystemVerilog, it’s more or less a subset of it. And SystemVerilog had much more industry support for design verification. So if I were to design some open source software for HDLs, that reason alone would make VHDL a non-starter.

Intel employee. Can confirm all of the above.