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Can a Computer Science Student Be Taught to Design Hardware?

semiengineering.com

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Re: Can a Computer Science Student Be Taught to Design Hardware?

#21

Post by general1465 »

acuozzo wrote: post #7
IshKebab wrote: post #6

Obviously. Hardware designers absolutely love to think that hardware design is totally different to software design and only they have the skills, but in reality it's barely diffetent. Stuff runs in parallel. You occasionally have to know about really hardware things like timing and metastability. But the venn diagram of hardware/software design skills is pretty much two identical circles. The reason for the "talent…

> is really just because hardware design is a niche field Which doesn't pay as well as jobs in software do, unfortunately.

Exactly money is problem. I am by trade hardware designer. I have no problem to sit down, create PCB in KiCAD and have it made perfect on first try. But I am doing this just as a hobby because it does not pay much. SWE just pays better even with the AI scarecrow behind it.

Re: Can a Computer Science Student Be Taught to Design Hardware?

#23

Post by SomaticPirate »

Hilarious to see Cadence and Synopsys in this article. They are arguably the cause. The complete lack of open source tooling and their agressive tooling price is the exact reason this ecosystem continues to be an absolute dumpster fire.

I used Vivado (from Xilinx) a bit during my undergrad in computer engineering and was constantly surprised at how much of a complete disaster the tooling chain was. Crashes that would erase all your work. Strange errors.

I briefed worked at a few hardware companies and I was always taken aback by the poor state of the tooling which was highly correlated with the license terms dicated by EDA tools. Software dev seemed much more interesting and portable. Working in hardware meant you would almost always be searching between Intel, Arm, AMD and maybe Nvidia if you were a rockstar.

Software by comparison offered plentiful opportunities and a skill set that could be used at an insurance firm or any of the fortune 100s. I've always loved hardware but the opaque datasheets and IP rules kills my interest everytime.

Also, I would argue software devs make better hardware engineers. Look at Oxide computer. They have fixed bugs in AMD's hardware datasets because of their insane attention to detail. Software has eaten the world and EEs should not be writing the software that brings up UEFI. We would have much more powerful hardware systems if we were able to shine a light on the inner workings of most hardware.

Re: Can a Computer Science Student Be Taught to Design Hardware?

#24

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

joezydeco wrote: post #19

UIUC CS grad from the late 80s. CS students had to take a track of electrical engineering courses. Physics E&M, intro EE, digital circuits, microprocessor/ALU design, microprocessor interfacing.... It paid off immensely in my embedded development career. I'm guessing this isn't part of most curricula anymore?

That curricula is often more specifically called "Computer Engineering". CS students meanwhile usually aren't bothered by anything below the compiler.

Re: Can a Computer Science Student Be Taught to Design Hardware?

#25

Post by general1465 »

IshKebab wrote: post #8
IshKebab wrote: post #6

Obviously. Hardware designers absolutely love to think that hardware design is totally different to software design and only they have the skills, but in reality it's barely diffetent. Stuff runs in parallel. You occasionally have to know about really hardware things like timing and metastability. But the venn diagram of hardware/software design skills is pretty much two identical circles. The reason for the "talent…

In fact I'll go further - in my experience people with a software background make much better hardware designers than people with an EE background because they are aware of modern software best practices. Many hardware designers are happy to hack whatever together with duck tape and glue. As a result most of the hardware industry is decades behind the software industry in many ways, e.g. still relying on hacky Perl a…

> in my experience people with a software background make much better hardware designers than people with an EE background because they are aware of modern software best practices.

I know them. Especially older folks. Ramming all parts on one huge sheet instead of separation by function. Refusing to use buses. Refusing to insert part numbers into schematics so they can just export BoM directly and writing BoM by hand instead.

Watching these guys is like watching lowest office worker inserting values from Excel into calculator so he can then write the result into same Excel table.

Re: Can a Computer Science Student Be Taught to Design Hardware?

#27

Post by joezydeco »

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #24
joezydeco wrote: post #19

UIUC CS grad from the late 80s. CS students had to take a track of electrical engineering courses. Physics E&M, intro EE, digital circuits, microprocessor/ALU design, microprocessor interfacing.... It paid off immensely in my embedded development career. I'm guessing this isn't part of most curricula anymore?

That curricula is often more specifically called "Computer Engineering". CS students meanwhile usually aren't bothered by anything below the compiler.

I actually started Illinois as a Computer Engineering major and switched to Computer Science because I thought I'd get to use all the cool supercomputers at the Beckman Institute. Those electrical courses were all part of my CS requirements. Illinois CS was big on architecture, having designed Illiac and all of that stuff. Hennessy/Patterson for life.

The supercomputer thing... never happened. And I turned out to have a CE career anyway.

Re: Can a Computer Science Student Be Taught to Design Hardware?

#28

Post by agg23 »

I wasn't taught directly (and don't know what I'm doing still), but I've had a lot of fun learning about retro hardware design as a software engineer. I've made a few of my own reverse engineered designs, trying to synthesize how the real designers would have built the chip at the time, and ported others for the Analogue Pocket and MiSTer project.

Here's an example of my implementation of the original Tamagotchi: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45737872 (https://github.com/agg23/fpga-tamagotchi)

Re: Can a Computer Science Student Be Taught to Design Hardware?

#29

Post by mikewarot »

I think there are two separate areas of concern here, hardware, and computation. I strongly believe that a Computer Science program that only includes variants of the Von Neumann model of computation is severely lacking. While it's interesting to think about Turing Machines and Church numbers, etc... the practical use of FPGAs and other non-CPU based logic should definitely be part of the modern CS education.

The vagaries of analog electronics, RF, noise, and the rest is another matter. While it's possible that a CS graduate might have a hint of how much they don't know, it's unreasonable to expect them to cover that territory as well.

Simple example, did you know that it's possible for 2 otherwise identical resistors to have more than 20db differences in their noise generation?[1] I've been messing with electronics and ham radio for 50+ years, and it was news to me. I'm not sure even a EE graduate would be aware of that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omn_Lh0MLA4&t=445s

Re: Can a Computer Science Student Be Taught to Design Hardware?

#30

Post by BitsAndObjects »

* The fact that there are comments misunderstanding the article, that are talking about PCB Design rather than (Silicon) Chip Design, speaks to the problem facing the chip industry. Total lack of wider awareness and many misunderstandings.

* Chip design pays better than software in many cases and many places (US and UK included; but excluding comparisons to Finance/FinTech software, unless you happen to be in hardware for those two sectors)

* Software engineers make great digital logic verification engineers. They can also gradually be trained to do design too. There are significant and valuable skill and knowledge crossovers.

* Software engineers lack the knowledge to learn analogue design / verification, and there’s little to no knowledge-crossover.

* We have a shortage of engineers in the chip industry, particularly in chip design and verification, but also architecture, modelling/simulation, and low-level software. Unfortunately, the decline in hardware courses in academia is very long standing, and AI Software is just the latest fuel on the fire. AI Hardware has inspired some new people to join the industry but nothing like the tidal wave of new software engineers.

* The lack of open source hardware tools, workflows, high-quality examples, relative to the gross abundance of open source software, doesn’t help the situation, but I think it is more a symptom than it is a cause.

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