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I have been working for about 20 years. At the beginning of my career I had a choice of being in the ASIC side or board design and chose for board design becaus
by chclau 10y ago
I have been working for about 20 years. At the beginning of my career I had a choice of being in the ASIC side or board design and chose for board design because I thought (rightfully so, I learned later), that that was a more "physical" task. So I worked for about 10 years in board design and my typical work day was not typical at all. Some of the time researching parts. Some making schematics of circuits. Some making PCB layout. Some on debug and integration. Some time mastering scope and logic analyzer use. Some time talking my way thru all the people I have to receive products from/deliver to: SW engineers, FPGA engineers, mechanical engineers...
I made analog designs, digital designs, power supply designs... Then I started feeling more and more that I designed less and spent more time learning what the chip designers did, as chips incorporated more and more functions that once I did by myself.
So at the end I switched to FPGA design and today my typical workday is coding, debugging, simulating... 95% of the time on my computer. A good friend of mine coined a good phrase: FPGA engineers are SW engineers that disguise themselves as HW engineers. A good joke. But every joke has a bit of truth in it.
- pepijndevos 10y agoIt seems like board design is a much less monotonous and more practical task that you seemed to enjoy. What made you change to FPGA? Do you feel that the bulk of what used to be board design is now happening inside silicon? I started my career as a software developer, but got bored by web development that seems to make up 90% of the industry, so I started to study EE because I really enjoy playing prototyping fun projects. I just ordered a PCB for one of my projects. But when I read your, and other comments, it seems that just as the things I enjoy about programming are not what a typical job is about, the things I enjoy about EE are not what typical EE jobs are about. I'm not sure where that leaves me...
- chclau 10y agoYeps, as I said, I felt that I was doing less design and more system integration or "lego building". Besides, I had been doing that for many years and I thought a change was due. From my description it may seem that FPGA is monotonous... that was not my intention at all. For me, FPGA design is much more challenging and fun than board design never was. The downside of FPGA design is that human contact is much more limited. You cannot really receive answers for your questions, because most of these things are subjective. You have to make your own way and make your own experience. Experience, after all, is the comb you get when you have no more hair ^^