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Ha, I'm interning with their chip design team right now. They've done 7 tapeouts but there's a lot of mistakes and other issues down in the plumbing. I wouldn'

Ha, I'm interning with their chip design team right now. They've done 7 tapeouts but there's a lot of mistakes and other issues down in the plumbing. I wouldn't say their program is significantly better or worse than any other, and my understanding is this focus on a "Semiconductor Degree" is just a reshuffling of courses already offered in EE and ECE degrees. Certainly there are teams far ahead of Purdue. The programs at UCSD and OSU that are pioneering the work on OpenROAD and Skywater 130 are the ones who are really ahead of the game. If I could be at any program in the US, those are where I would want to be. That said Purdue is absolutely ahead of the average ECE program. Very few undergrad programs are completing tapeouts on a regular basis, even at schools that would otherwise have the funding to accomplish it. There are plenty of schools that think of ECE as "EE plus some CS courses" and don't even teach much HDL, much less how to layout a standard cell or do timing analysis.

Gollapalli 4y ago
Is OSU Oklahoma or Ohio?
- nickelpro 4y ago
  Oklahoma. I'm actually working with a kid from Ohio State who's constantly ragging on their program for not even teaching Verilog much less how to build an ASIC. Purdue's program is ok, but it's a veritable bastion of academic excellence compared to schools that have no staff that have ever performed a tapeout, which is most of them. Electrical Engineering departments have tons of faculty who know what they're talking about. CS departments have people who mostly kinda sorta know what they're talking about (even if they're 10 years out of date, which is an eternity in CS). I would wager most schools don't have a single faculty member who's performed a small tapeout, much less a big project for an industry leader. Actual ECE, VLSI, the building of chips, is a wasteland on the academic side of the house IMHO.
  - wcunning 4y ago
    Look at the people around SiFive and RISC-V at UC-Berkeley and look at the transistor guys at UMich. Both groups do lots of work that directly tapes out or works with companies who do. My digital logic prof at UMich took sabbatical to do a startup that netted him a bunch of money on… I forget the details now, but they did a smaller tape out to prove the concept before selling to Intel. It’s not that uncommon.
    - nickelpro 4y ago
      UCB and UM are top 5 schools for this, with maybe MIT sitting above them because of Lincoln Lab. UCB literally invented RISCV (among a million other fundamental CS and CE technologies). They are not representative of the typical state school or even well funded private schools. I'm at NYU Tandon and they are a decade behind on most stuff, the single VLSI course is an elective even for ECEs. I work with students from state schools all across the country, and the most common reaction I get with rising seniors coming from EE and ECE programs is "I have never seen any of this stuff before". What I'm trying to say is: I've yet to meet an ECE senior who couldn't write Hello World in C or perform linear DC analysis, but it's surprisingly rare to find one who can layout a ring oscillator.

Gollapalli 4y ago

Is OSU Oklahoma or Ohio?

nickelpro 4y ago
Oklahoma. I'm actually working with a kid from Ohio State who's constantly ragging on their program for not even teaching Verilog much less how to build an ASIC. Purdue's program is ok, but it's a veritable bastion of academic excellence compared to schools that have no staff that have ever performed a tapeout, which is most of them. Electrical Engineering departments have tons of faculty who know what they're talking about. CS departments have people who mostly kinda sorta know what they're talking about (even if they're 10 years out of date, which is an eternity in CS). I would wager most schools don't have a single faculty member who's performed a small tapeout, much less a big project for an industry leader. Actual ECE, VLSI, the building of chips, is a wasteland on the academic side of the house IMHO.
- wcunning 4y ago
  Look at the people around SiFive and RISC-V at UC-Berkeley and look at the transistor guys at UMich. Both groups do lots of work that directly tapes out or works with companies who do. My digital logic prof at UMich took sabbatical to do a startup that netted him a bunch of money on… I forget the details now, but they did a smaller tape out to prove the concept before selling to Intel. It’s not that uncommon.
  - nickelpro 4y ago
    UCB and UM are top 5 schools for this, with maybe MIT sitting above them because of Lincoln Lab. UCB literally invented RISCV (among a million other fundamental CS and CE technologies). They are not representative of the typical state school or even well funded private schools. I'm at NYU Tandon and they are a decade behind on most stuff, the single VLSI course is an elective even for ECEs. I work with students from state schools all across the country, and the most common reaction I get with rising seniors coming from EE and ECE programs is "I have never seen any of this stuff before". What I'm trying to say is: I've yet to meet an ECE senior who couldn't write Hello World in C or perform linear DC analysis, but it's surprisingly rare to find one who can layout a ring oscillator.