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Interesting. Couldn't younger people learn good VLSI design? I guess they would need mentors though to help them get up to speed quickly.
by bhouston 8y ago
Interesting.
Couldn't younger people learn good VLSI design? I guess they would need mentors though to help them get up to speed quickly.
- bsder 8y agoThings surrounding VLSI design are a remarkable amount of tribal knowledge that isn't written down. Things like: "Why don't you tie a pass transistor to a storage node directly to a long bus?" killed at least 3 microprocessor designs (that I know of). There are a million things like this, and none of them are worth writing down since they are of zero use to anyone outside of the industry/company and often are specific to design techniques or fabrication lines. Samsung moved almost 100 engineers to Boston in order to try to second source manufacturing for the Alpha, had DEC engineers who were happy to help them, and still was only marginally successful. In VLSI, 6 nines means you still have 200 failing transistors on your 200 million transistor chip.