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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
by DigitalJack 9y ago
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.
- PascLeRasc 9y agoDigital logic was also one of my favorite classes. Really fun to think about some of the problems.
- throwaway613834 9y ago> 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.
- DigitalJack 9y agoNope. 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.
- psykotic 9y agoCE/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.
- PascLeRasc 9y agoWe'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.
- DigitalJack 9y agoHonestly 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.
- throwaway613834 9y ago> 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?
- saym 9y agoTake 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.