From: Andrew Lentvorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Gabriel Sechan wrote:
Probably true. My degree is in CompE from UIUC. A pretty well respected
school in the field. Processor design was a required course, and taught
you VHDL (at least the basics). Chip layouts and how transistors are made
(n and p silicon, worrying about capacitance and indutance and all that
stuff) was a separate, optional course. Few took it and most dropped it
(including myself, although by that time I had decided to go into
software).
Most dropped it? That's really disappointing.
Especially for UIUC. There are really only a handful of universities with
the ability to truly teach semiconductors. UIUC is one of the stars.
UMich and UT-Austin are effectively UIUC-North and UIUC-South in
semiconductors.
That pretty much only leaves UC-Berkeley. MIT and Stanford have become
pretty useless at VLSI.
Ouch. I knew it was bad; I didn't think it was this bad.
Well, the course is still available. Including the followup, which has a
lab where you can actually fab a chip as an undergrad. What I don't know is
what percentage of those who dropped vs those who didn't went into chip
design vs those who go into software. A lot of CompEs go into software,
especially firmware. An understanding of VLSI isn't really necessary there.
In retrospect I wish I had learned more in the course (I do at least know
how to make simple not, nand, and nor gates from pure silicon) but don't
regret dropping it- my mind just phases out when capacitance and inductance
come into play, I always hated my analog courses.
On a side note- I really don't like how analog is taught entirely. Digital
I grasped pretty much immediately- I understood boolean logic. I could sit
down and design a simple processor today, if I needed to. But despite being
able to find the voltage and current of any LRC circuit by 3 methods, I'm
damned if I know how to actually design a circuit that does anything with
those components. If I had been taught how to *use* them to design useful
stuff earlier, I would have been more inclined to try harder at analog.
Gabe
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