Hi all,
I am looking at some FPGA related jobs and am finding that very few involve
100% FPGA design.Typically I am finding that current jobs will involve additional activities such as DSP processor programming as well.
I was wondering if you guys would be able to comment on whether your jobs or jobs of people you know involve mostly (or 100%) FPGA design? Or are you required to do other stuff as well?
Many thanks for your time,
Dave
If you are doing DSP, I would expect a reasonable knowledge of DSP either programming DSP processors and or converting algorithms to HW flow.
If you are working on any bus interface, that would likely mean knowing that bus pretty well and use of analyzers etc, and pretty likely writing a driver esp if usb,pci.
If you are doing DRAM interface same thing (but no SW driver there).
And if you are crazy enough to do some projects like a cpu design, you also get to write the compiler too and the cpu ISA simulators and the memory interface and..., but thats pretty unusual, but atleast a few have done this.
I don't think you can do FPGA design just because you have digital HW knowledge, there has to be an application area and knowledge base. Mind you if you can complete a project in 1 area, it should help when moving to an entirely different application, just more book reading along the way.
And the usual drudgery of verification, testing, documentation, endless (& pointless) meetings, custommer interface will be there too.
my 2c
johnjakson at usa dot com transputer2 at yahoo dot com
Why do you want to stick to FPGA ? You won't make a complete product anyway. What is wrong with doing what is connected to it too ? There was recently a one-man company here advertizing that he's doing VHDL and Verilog, none else. No pcb, no software on no cpu, nothing. Yes, if that is sufficient for a product...
Rene
-- Ing.Buero R.Tschaggelar - http://www.ibrtses.com & commercial newsgroups - http://www.talkto.net
The larger the company is that you work for, the more specialized you can potentially be.
In a small company, there is no way that doing "just FPGA design" will be enough. You will probably need to design the whole board the FPGA goes into. You may have to lay the board out, too, or at least deal with the people who DO lay it out. (Of course, if it is a small company who does FPGA design by contract, that is different. I'm envisioning a small company which produces some kind of end-product which is not just IP.)
And you will then have to bring those boards up and test or characterize them and so on.
In a large company, it may be possible to spend most of your time doing FPGA design. But even then, much of the design work will be writing a design spec, interfacing with board designers, as well as marketing and test people, and so on.
IMO if you think you can spend more than half your time, on average, writing code and running simulations, you are probably out of line with reality. Of course, YMMV. And I have more experience working with small companies than big ones, so my experience may be skewed.
--Mac
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