21 Mar
2009
21 Mar
'09
2:27 p.m.
Jim Battle wrote:
Chuck Guzis wrote:
...
Some of the new asic/fpga development have been using C for hardware
design, we started using a derivative of C before getting rif'd from
Lucent -- saves many lines of code. But nothing beats a schematic :)
=Dan
[ = http://www2.applegate.org/~ragooman/ ]
Nowadays many "hardware" positions seem to rely on one's ability to
spew Verilog or VHDL and not know which end of the soldiering iron is
the hot one.
--Chuck
Chuck, that was spoken like a true old-timer, but your derision is
laughable. "Hey, you damn verilog coders, get off my lawn!"
I'm surprised, as you saw the transition from tubes to transistors to
ICs, so it shouldn't shock you that the next evolution of integration
requires just as much engineering and intelligence, although the
problems to be solved are somewhat different.
And believe me, even with hardware jobs consisting of "spewing"
verilog code, there is quite a difference in the work of a hardware
job and a software job. Some can do either job well, but not many.
No doubt there are challenging designs that are done at board level
(e.g., DRAM interfaces with a 300ps data cycle time), but most of it
is simply connecting together the chips in a prescribed way, kind of
like doing a connect the dots drawing. The action these days is
inside the chip.