Can a Computer Science Student Be Taught to Design Hardware?

You've taken two separate points I made and rolled them into one, resulting in you arguing against a point I didn't make.

The "misunderstandings and lack of awareness" I was referring to is in regards to many people outside the semiconductor industry. These aspects are hurting our industry, by putting people off joining it. I was not referring to people inside the industry, nor the SemiEngineering article.

As for salaries: See my other comments. In addition, I think it's worth acknowledging that neither hardware nor software salaries are a flat hierarchy. Senior people in different branches of software or hardware are paid vastly different amounts (e.g. foundational AI models versus programming language runtimes...). For someone looking at whether to go into software or hardware roles, I would advise them that there's plenty of money to be made in either, so pursue the one which is more interesting to them. If people are purely money-motivated, they should disappear off into the finance sector - they'll make far more money there.

As for movement from software into hardware: I've primarily seen this with people moving into hardware verification - successfully so, and in line with what the article says too. The transfer of skills is effective, and verification roles at the kind of processor companies I've been in or adjacent to, pay well and such engineers are in high-demand. I'm speaking from a UK perspective. Other territories, well, I hear EU countries and the US are in a similar situation but I don't have that data.

Do more hardware engineers transition into software than the other way around? Yeah, for sure, but that's not the point I think anyone is arguing over. It's not "do people do this transition" (some do, most don't), rather it's:

"We would like more people to be making this transition from SW into HW. How do we achieve that?"

And to that I say: Let's dispel a few myths, have a data-driven conversation about compensation, and figure out what's really going to motivate people to shift. If it only came down to salary, everyone would go into finance/fintech (and an awful lot of engineering grads do...) but clearly there's more to the decision than just salary, and more to it than just market demand.

some additional thoughts:

i think that, for digital design to be interesting, the cost of entry must be lowered by probably orders upon orders of magnitude.

the google skywaterpdk thing, whatever it is (or was?), did produce a great deal of hobbyist designs and proved that there really isn't anything special about rtl - infact, its really quite monotonous and boring.

which is a good attitude to have, really. lots of hobbyist designs got cranked out quickly on what, as i understood, was a very obsolete pdk from two decades ago.

but its fundamentally still too expensive and too limited. open source software 'blew up' because

1. the cost of entry was free...

2. ...for state of the art tools.

its not enough to be free, or open source. it also has to be competitive. llvm/gcc won the compiler world because they blew the codegen of proprietary compilers out of the water, ofcourse being open source it became a positive feedback loop of lots of expert eyeballs -> better compiler -> more experts look at it -> better compiler -> ...

for digital design to become interesting, you can't trick the kids: they want the same tech the 'big boys' are using. so, what scope is there to make it economical for someone like Intel carving out some space for a no-strings-attached digital design lottery?

i get the impression that, unlike for most manufacturing processes, the costs of silicon digital electronics increases every year, and the amortisation schedule becomes bigger, not smaller.

so if anything, it seems that the more high tech silicon manufacturing becomes, the smaller the pool of players (who have the ever-increasing capital expenditure necessary) becomes, which should indicate that the opportunities for digital design work are actually going to be shrinking as time goes on.

I'm glad to hear that. Did you have to learn Verilog, VHDL, or something else in the FPGA programming?

At UC Berkeley in the early-mid 90s, I think I had two digital design courses. The first was low level basics like understanding logic gates, flip flops, gray coding, PROM, ALUs, multiplexers, etc., with a physical project using 7000-series chips on breadboard. The second was the whole 32 bit MIPS/SPIM pipelined CPU design and simulation project based on the Patterson and Hennessy text book.

But, I seem to recall there were ways to bypass most hardware background knowledge for a CS degree. You had to do intro math and physics that did classical mechanics, but you could stop short of most of the electromagnetic stuff or multivariate calculus. You could get your breadth credits in other areas like statistics, philosophy, and biology. I think you could also bypass digital design with mix of other CS intro courses like algorithms, operating systems, compilers, graphics, database systems, and maybe AI?

> In all of the material (two textbooks and numerous handouts) there was no mention of the obvious similarities to Ada

Really? That's kind of the point of VHDL, isn't it? (vs. Verilog's unholy combination of C-like syntax with begin/end blocks, etc.)

VHDL also inherits Ada's module style, designed to have different implementations of the same thing (and verbosity, where it seems like you often have to say the same thing repeatedly, for better or for worse - more type checking at the expense of more typing at the keyboard.)