Survey: FPGA PCB layout (2025 Update)

Plus probably a nice retirement benefit.

That is strange. Normally they should have known this guy inside out before even offering tenure if that's what his new position entails.

True, but I am a believer in face to face sessions when it comes to explaining EE matters. You can't beat the hands-on training in front of a big scope or analyzer. "Sir, I can't get that dang thang to trigger!"

Yes, his site is indeed excellent. I am surprised IEEE lets him publish his papers. When I wrote papers for IEEE transactions there was a pretty clear statement that you pretty much surrender copyright to them.

I believe they did know him inside and out, were happy with his performance, and that's why it happened: They had already decided they were going to offer him the promotion, but some standard procedure required getting a student evaluation as well... so they had to find someone who was willing to write up a positive one. I just think it's strange that they bother getting a student evaluation when their minds are already made up... since it then puts them in the rather awkward position of having to say, "Please write us a good evaluation, or if you don't feel you can, that's OK, we'll find someone else..." Weird.

Perhaps they'd do better to ask a handful of students to write up objective evaluations without the pressure of "...but, um, it has to be positive?" -- and then culling any that were negative? :-) I suppose they're stuck in a way... being tied to the government (they're a land-grant university) means they have to follow lots of procedures that regular businesses don't.

Regarding the nice retirement packages... my understanding was that state workers ended up with rather cushy retirement packages in exchange for having to accept noticeably below-average salaries (relative to private industry) during their working years. In Oreogn we have the PERS (Public Employee Retirement System) which used to work this way, but the "cushy" benefits were signifcantly reduced via the ballot box when some interested parties pointed out how much better PERS was than what those folks in private industry get. Hence you now have a system where public employee pay still isn't competitive with private industry and now the retirement isn't either! This was a common topic of complaint by the professors (that you'd get to know well enough) when I was in grad school; a significant number left for private industry during that time, and I certainly coudn't blame them.

That being said, I don't know enough to evaluate whether or not public jobs are still attractive when you look at the total package -- some people would argue they are and that PERS benefit reductions were just "corrections" to a system that had become too "generous" in its compensation.

---Joel

All I know from here (CA) is that their benefits are mind-boggling. Paid sick leave, fat disability payments where lots of people tried and succeeded to be declared "disabled", cradle-to-grave medical with hardly any co-pay. The latter alone will saddle our communities with previously unheard of debt. Oh, and then lots of jobs have the retirement benefit tied to the last work year. So, folks have themselves transferred into high-cost areas such as the Bay Area for 13 months or so, then move back. That ratchets their monthly checks up substantially, until their dying day. That ain't right.

Well, it's entirely reasonable to have retirement benefits for public employees be comparable to what private companies offer... I just hope that public employee salaries will then become comparable as well (which implies a pay raise), since otherwise I don't see how the gov't. expects they'll get comparable quality out of their workers.

One problem with the government seems to be that they don't expect their employees to be agile over time. See this article:

I expect that was implemented to help people who were *forced* to move?

It seems like it needs reworking to differentiate between cases where the government wants to move you vs. you just voluntarily wanting to do so.

---Joel

I start thinking about how the PCB should be routed the minute I start to draw a schematic. I always draw components with their actual pin-outs. This helps to group pins together and it helps to troubleshoot the circuit when the prototype is on your bench (no need to lookup the pinouts because they are in your diagram).

Whether you should do PCB layout by yourself or hire someone to do it for you depends on if you have the time and talent to design a PCB. After all at high frequencies and / or large currents a PCB becomes a component of your circuit.

What does that mean?

I suspect he means that the schematic symbol he draws have the pins arranged with the same placement as that which occurs on the physical device.

I've drawn some symbols like this at times, as it works OK for small devices, but of course has problems as soon as someone hits the "mirror" button on your symbol... and becomes intractable for devices with hundreds or even thousands of pins.

You sometimes see magazines doing this in beginning electronics articles where they'll have a bunch of logic gates or similar drawn nicely within the DIP rectangle it comes in on top of a solderless breadboard or something so it's crystal clear how the circuit should be wired up.

Mirroring is not allowed ofcourse :-) And yes, it won't work for BGA packages. The largest common QFP device is approx 200 pins which is still workable.

Private companies generally offer zilch in retirement benefits. Those days are long gone.

A 70 year old programmer can be better than a 40 year old. At least that's my impression when I see all the "modern" bloatware ;-)

Or you just have to have the right connections to make that happen ...

Anyhow, why should retirement checks be based on the last year of service? IMHO that's wrong. For everyone else it sure doesn't work that way.

For quad opamps like the LM324 as well? That can make a schematic harder to read and will also cause a nightmare if the layouter wants to swap amp A with amp C and stuff like that.

I don't know about "gone". The age of the "defined benefit" is pretty much gone in private industry but several still have "defined contribution" plans. Now, 401Ks make up for a lot of what's been lost and are portable.

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Maybe. There are better things to do at 70, though. ;-)

The last years' is indicative of the final salary. Most "defined benefit" plans do take the last year, or last couple of years into account. What most private pensions *don't* do, that public plans do is include overtime in the formula. It's not hard to double one's income for a couple of years. There is no way the tax payer should pay that forever.

Sure, but 401(k) is generally funded by the employee. Occasionally the company throws in a little extra but that is mostly a mere drop in the bucket in contrast to the lavish pension plans that cover many state workers.

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Yes, definitely. OTOH completely quitting a career has brought many fine engineers into the grave within less than a year. My father who worked as a data processing engineer continued as a consultant and gradually tapered it off. He said that there was a rash of unexpected deaths of otherwise quite healthy colleagues right after retirement, and it was among the group of engineers who shut their careers down more or less overnight after the first retirement check arrived.

But it's happening. And we are all paying for that.

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It's quite normal for a company to add significantly to the 401K, sometimes with strings attached, sometimes without. My PPOE had a fairly decent 401K (in addition to pension plans for everyone joining before '06, or so). They matched 1:1 up to 6% of salary (plus bonusus) and had no management fees for the normal funds. I understand it's gotten better since they've dropped the pension plans for the newbs.

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I got quite bored, once I wasn't allowed to make messes at home anymore. Good thing that only lasted a week or two. ;-)

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Precisely. It's not going to get better. The government requires others to have fully funded retirement plans, but would have none of it for themselves.

No. Those (and simple logic) have very few pins.

Ok, then you'd have to modify your statement "always" :-)

Am I the nitpicker or what?

A quad opamp doesn't have 1738 pins!

John

Well, yes, I was just wondering about whether Nico really always draws the physical package. Looks like he doesn't for smaller stuff.

With 1738 pins you can only hope that the FPGA has enough routing resources. That used to be a major pain in the early 90's. Don't know about nowadays since other guys design the parts with the big FPGAs. And I am glad I don't have to deal with BGA, at least not with large ones ...

The biggest ones we use are Sparten 3's with 456 balls on 1 mm centers. We haven't had any routing problems so far, doing pretty complex stuff at 128 MHz clock rates. Our in-house BGA soldering yield, to date, is exactly 100%. BGAs seem to be a lot easier to solder reliably than fine-pitch leaded parts. Easier to inspect, too, since you can't inspect them at all.

John

Bloggs has several times stated that he doesn't design electronics. He hasn't stated what he actually does.

John