CompuPro CPU-68000

On Mar 21, 2009, at 12:38 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: Well, if the position is for designing ASICs or SOCs then it really is more important to know how to write Verilog/VHDL. The likely hood of actually having to "mod" the board is small, and they'll have "technicians" for that and special stations with the fine temperature controlled soldering irons plus optics to actually see the work. If you're dealing with BGAs then reworks require fairly sophisticated equipment (including being able to do X-Ray scans of the board to check that all of the balls on the BGA are attached properly). There's still a need to "dead bug" some fixes but that's becoming more and more rare. In reality most HW design these days is either with micro-controllers or FPGA/ASICs. The traditional discrete TTL designs are pretty much gone because the designs require small size/high integration or high speed, which you can't really do with discrete TTL (or pick your logic family). And if you're building a number of "widgets" you don't have to have too high volumes before it really is cheaper to do FPGA/ASICs rather than discrete. I'm becoming a big fan of FPGAs for my designs for two principle reasons. One is that I can simulate the design before committing it to actual HW. This finds a huge number of issues. I can also write comprehensive test cases that would be hard to do with actual hardware. The other one is that if I do find something that slips past the simulation then it's a simple problem to update FPGA image. And no you don't have to have megabucks to do this. There are some free (which is what I use) Verilog simulation tools that are quite good (in my very limited experience) and each of the FPGA vendors have free versions of their tools (they are after all trying to sell the parts). Also, many part vendors (non-FPGA, ie RAMs, etc) provide pretty comprehensive models for their parts to be used in simulation so it isn't that hard to simulate an entire design encompassing many different parts. TTFN - Guy