Finding success in industry as a chip designer

I suspect this revelation is why his start-up didn't succeed. The economics in silicon are brutal.

> As much as 80 percent of the physical area in today’s most advanced chips is occupied by blocks that aren’t made for specific products or even designed by the consumer-facing companies that built them.

It's morosely sad how so much chipmaking requires not just expensive chipmaking, but incredibly restrictive IP licensing. The whole Silicon Foundry model that lead to such prosperity & growth is now gated upon these primitives of computing, that only a handful of companies know how to make. The academics are all downstream of this control, limited in what they can play with, when they don't have access to ram blocks or ethernet or usb blocks.

I'd had some hopes there for a bit that open source chips were going to eventually work around this, that there's be enough interest in commoditizing and making accessible these things, in the way that open source unlocked so much growth in computing. I still hope I live to see such a re-opening happen. But it feels like it's going to be a lot more decades than I was hoping for.

Industry wants to have the best memory, SATA, PCIe controllers, floating point units, SRAM units, etc.

Those components need to be optimized to the particular process and the companies that are best at developing them are also the same companies making the tools used to design semiconductors in the first place.

Cadence has to build a feature to design analog electronics in their software package. Then they have to make sure that their designs are compatible/manufacturable at all the foundries. This means they will inevitably develop all the basic components anyway and there is not much point to avoid paying them for the end result.

An integer adder or a multiplier is a commodity, the same adder optimized for a specific fab is a specialized good worth tens of thousands, if it means you can avoid the hassle of a tape out just to test your novel design. Nobody is realistically competing on adder designs and for the complex analog stuff, the development effort may add up to several tapeouts.

Good write-up.

Anybody have some good book recommendations on how to get into chip design (SoC/ASIC/FPGA/etc.) for somebody from embedded software background?

When I was in college more than 20 years ago there was a class where we designed our own transistors (with a lot of help from the course material), assembled those into logic gates and registers, assembled those into adders, multipliers, memories, etc., and finally implemented a function like a CRC calculator/checker. We then sent our designs to MOSIS and got a chip back. By far the coolest class I took.

Then I got into industry and saw that each of those steps is done by a different team of people, often at different companies. Most companies doing "chip design" today are buying off-the-shelf processors, system busses, memories, dma engines, network subsystems, sensor interfaces, etc. and just wiring them up. It's honestly kind of just, tedious now. The challenges have more to do with making sure those components are all mated up correctly than in doing any fun design work, at least for everyone on the team except the "chip architect." Working on the verification team is usually more interesting than on the design team on these kinds of projects (but don't tell the designers I said that).

I currently work for a company doing novel digital designs targeting FPGAs. There are still some off-the-shelf parts such as a PCIe, Ethernet, etc. blocks, but a good amount of the stuff I did in school, such as designing state machines, efficient data structures, and instruction sets. It's pretty fun.