more EE Times nonsense

That would be an interesting interview.

John

Larkin would probably hire Slowman... you know, birds of a feather :-) ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
      The only thing bipartisan in this country is hypocrisy

--
The _point_ of his post was to state that your demise would be our good
fortune, and regardless of whether he couched his metaphor in the
trappings of a fortuitous volcanic eruption or, say, a lucky hit by a
benevolent meteorite, it was the end which was important, not the odds
of the means.

JF

Indeed...

I'm guessing you're the oldest person at Highland, John? How much younger is the next-youngest employee?

(I'm getting at the idea here that people over 40? 50? 60? perhaps aren't hired based on their becoming rather "gelled" in their mindsets about how to design things, even if they do have a history of successful products, as Bill claims to and Jim certainly does, yet clearly you have a different approach to design than either of them... but of course also design highly-successful widgets... :-) )

Wow, I never knew that Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope and P G Wodehouse and William Shekespeare were Republicans. That's actually comforting, and makes sense. They all understood how the world works.

John

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Straw man.

One of my test guys is about my age, I'm not sure in which direction. I don't think either of us would ever retire voluntarily.

Frankly, I'd be reluctant to hire an engineer as old as myself. I can clearly see that I have less energy than I used to have, and am getting reluctant to learn new things like C++ and Perl and VHDL (which, you have to admit, are abominations.) And I want prople who will grow and be around for a while and eventually own the company.

Some of my visual-spatial skills aren't what they used to be, like the ability to visualize 3D structures rotated in space. Fortunately, we now have things like SolidWorks and Spice and email archives to take over some of the heavy lifting and remembering.

I'm increasingly architecting (and selling) products and getting help on implementation. That makes sense, actually: the world has become far too complex for a single person to be good at everything. We just yesterday brainstormed an LVDT/synchro/resolver simulator that's mostly digital, with several people arguing and inventing at the same time, with the resulting whiteboard photos going to potential customers for reaction. That's very satisfying.

John

--
Too bad there isn't a Slowman Electronics to which an appropriate
parallel could be drawn.

JF

VHDL especially... talk about overly-wordy...

While it's not cheap, if you can spare the time going to the week-long classes to learn a new programming/hardware design language is quite effective, at least for me -- it's faster than sitting down and reading a book (particularly since a good instructor is going to omit the less-important details, whereas with a book detecting which details are less important and skipping them yourself can sometimes be a bit of a catch-22), and of course you get to ask questions and expect a solid response, which a book can't do (and a newsgroup takes longer and gets sidetracked).

I've been reading up a bit on wxPython in my spare time lately (it's a GUI-ing kit for the Python language -- a set of bindings for wxWidgets, which is C++-based cross-platform GUI toolkit that I used in one piece of software for work here). I'm thinking of re-writing your PowerBASIC 11802 screen capture routine in it, just as an exercise... should be fun, if I do it!

Ah, not going to hire those guys who pre-Internet-bubble-bust were "strategically" finding a new job every 12-24 months just to pump up their salaries, eh? :-)

Absolutely, that makes lots of sense.

---Joel

There's apparently no logic as to where you put semicolons. Ironic in a logic design language.

My best FPGA guy gave us a seminar on VHDL. One of my test techs really took to it, so I think she's on track to move up to engineering. She's going to do a simple VME module FPGA soon for starters. Then I'll have *two* people who can be my FPGA compilers. I can scribble a schematic/block disgram on a whiteboard, and they can go make it work. Just another level of design abstraction.

Do the data transfers in binary, please. I did ASCII because it was easier, but it's slow.

John

I had no problems finding work after >30 years working for one company and mid-fiftys. There were a few who tripped up (managers often aren't very bright and none can act) and made it obvious that they were (illegally) discriminating, but there were more than enough who wanted design engineers to ignore the morons. If that's how they run their business I wasn't interested anyhow.

Wordy, yes, but for good reason.

That's the way I like to do it. I've found that the instructor can give the "idea behind" a language that you really don't get from a book.

Fun? You must like dentists, too. ;-)

Actually there is (they go at the end of statements). It took me a while to "get it", though. ;-)

Good idea. VHDL isn't all that difficult if it's taught right the first time. When I first took the course the instructor got bogged down in internals that muddied up the whole thing. I taught myself VHDL a few years later. I wish I kept the book I used (one of the FPGA vendors gave it to me and as soon as I moved on to Ashenden it sprouted legs).

e 85%

Obama said otherwise. But then, he says so many things. Shrug.

You're right, it's not creating jobs here either:

So, back to the question, why not start your own outfit, and do it right? That's what makes the world a better place, people starting cool companies and hiring folks to work in them.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

I've received errors from VHDL compilers to the effect of, e.g., "there needs to be a colon precisely HERE; please insert it and re-compile." -- If a compiler is smart enough to know EXACTLY what's "missing," let me suggest that maybe the language doesn't need that bit of syntax or whatever in the first place...

But in general I prefer concise languages. E.g., simple closing constructs such as brackets in C/C++ or plain old tabs in Python rather than "end for," "end loop," "end xxxxx" like VHDL (...and Visual BASIC and...).

That being said, back when I used to write VHDL (I haven't in... wow... the better part of a decade now), I slowly built up a bunch of utility functions and various types/structures and what-not and eventually got to the point where I didn't feel like I was fighting with the language anymore and could quickly and reasonably easily express the functionality I was after. (Instead I got to the point where I discovered constructs like ALIAS were only

*partially* supported for synthesis in Synplicity... and Synplicity was already heads and shoulders above the piece of junk that was Synopsys's FPGA Express [aka, Distress]... no wonder Synposys bought them!)

The thing I like and enjoy about programming is that, being "all digital," generally things either work or they don't work, and if they don't work there's usually little or no cost involved by approaching the problem from an entirely different angle. Contrast that with, e.g,. RF design, where (1) you'd better come up with a reasonably good hardware architecture in the first place, as choosing poorly tends to be much more expensive in that board turns are required... and (2) while it's no problem making a receiver or whatever that "generally" works, you can expend a ton of time trying to meet sensitivity specs or interference specs or whatever, and yet there's often not a whole lot to show for it: Some shielding here, some layout changes there, some component value changes over yonder -- not anything the average person will notice.

In other words, I find some programming to be a relaxing thing to do when the difficult things start to become a little stressful. Of course, getting the difficult things to work is far more rewarding as well -- I wouldn't want to be a professional software writer, or at least not for the kind of software I write that's usually some weird little utility routine or whatnot but certainly not anything truly difficult/innovative (like a Google-level search engine, for instance); that'd get boring fast.

Programmable logic design is kind of inbetween these two extremes -- it stills works or it doesn't, mistakes are usually cheap (unless you completely mis-estimate the scope of the problem and need a bigger part), but hopefully the whole problem is due to having to perform some operation quickly or otherwise very efficienctly because that's why you picked an FPGA in the first place. (Just sweeping up a few random logic gates into a PLD is more of a chore than "fun.") One of the most interesting FPGA designs I did was a memory controller that had a bunch of FIFOed interfaces to various data consumers/generators hooked up to a 32-channel 2D DMA engine all connected to

8 sticks (4GB) of PC133 SDRAM... the fun part was trying to make the thing reasonably efficienct under the memory access demands of the numerous different DMA clients, so the core memory controller would usually be working on two transactions in parallel and would interleave various RAS and CAS cycles and even re-order memory accesses (then re-re-ordering them back correctly inside the controller) in order to try to never have to stall waiting for a page's precharge delay (that was something like 8 cycles).

Granted, if you were working on superscalar CPUs back at IBM, this probably isn't that impressive... :-) ...but as I say, it was certainly fun for me at the time!

---Joel

Ever looked at Ben Cohen's books? There's a man who like a VERY orderly design process!

No, but just took a quick look on Amazon. Seems reasonable. The book I used was pretty much VHDL for synthesis only, which greatly reduces the complexity of the language. I picked up the rest as I went along. Ashenden is OK for a reference but you're not going to learn much from it.

My favorite book was "VHDL for Logic Synthesis" by Andrew Rushton. For several years it and Kevin Skahill's "VHDL for Programmable Logic" (OK, but not great -- never even finished reading it) were the only two books I had on VHDL.

Ashenden's name started coming up a lot in later years there; seems to be quite popular.

---Joel

Yes, that's part of it being a very strongly typed language. It's *not* going to fix anything whether it knows how or not. It lets you shoot yourself. BTW, I had the same comments about ForTran compilers (in particular WatFOR and WatFIV).

Ick. You are a sick puppy! I *HATE* C, and everything that it stands for. PL/I was more to my liking. I don't think I've done any programming in anything other than assembler for 20 years, though.

A decade ago Synplicity was the only game in town. Now they're all pretty good. I have no clue what drugs Synopsis is on, though. They've sold the "VHDL design == programming" to a *lot* of PHBs, though.

I don't do RF either. Never had the interest or need.

I don't like programming because it puts me to sleep. I like designing hardware. VHDL is a nice tool to get there (though it too will put me to sleep).

When painting floors, always leave the back door open. I always start with a bigger part than I need (except the design I haven't been working on lately - only one part in the package I need) and use the extra space for debug hardware. Before production just change the BOM to a smaller part with the same footprint.

The design I did for LM was a color TV camera. One thing I learned was how a destroyer can cost $3B ($4K for each FPGA, $5K for each CCD, $45K for the prism, who knows how many millions for the mount - because the port hole is too small to meet specs).

Memory controllers can be pretty impressive beasts. The above camera used the Xilinx controller but I just swiped the design out of the FLIR camera (the color camera's Siamese twin). Yes, there was a bit of stuff in the G5. ;-)