Make a counter, the hello world of hardware. Go to your local electronic shop and get a few discrete chips (and & or gates) and a breadboard and some wires and have at it. I assume you know stuff about digital design like k-maps.
That's very unrelated to what I do, and I'd consider myself a CE. At work, I
never touch hardware. However, there's probably a good overlap between the people who like playing with electronics like that and people who do what I do... I guess I'm just trying to point out that if you hate working with chips, you could still really like CE. I
really hate debugging stuff built from components. The people who do testing in industry probably don't mind it.
I did write out a couple k-maps last year. This time, my work requires very little logic design.
No i want to be the first one and i know what they all are and have done all of'em (not job wise but like classes in school) except compmuter engineer i did put in a suggestion on having a class on that though so we'll see.
That's one of the problems with CE - it's nearly impossible to get a feel for it in high school. With CS, you can get into programming, and start looking at real CS in books or online (even if your teacher is incompetent).
If you like building PCs, or messing with Windows and Linux or writing web apps (playing around with PHP), you're probably not going to dislike IT.
You can't exactly just sit down with a spice simulator or verilog simulator or schematic editor and get going with CE in any meaningful way - there's a big initial learning curve to get started. Plus, even if you do design some circuit, you can't get a physical design out of it, so you can't see actual results (which isn't really encouraging... with CS, you could write a simple neural net program and train it to do something like recognize a picture). I think a big influence for me was talking to people from Anandtech (pm, sohcan, burntkooshie, and others) who were either in industry or college and getting an idea of what they were doing / learning about. After reading
this book on the recommendation of many people, I knew that computer architecture was something I wanted to learn about.
Originally posted by: itachi
CTho.. why ee and ce? i always had the impression that ce was a watered-down hybrid of ee and cs..
ECE is one major at Carnegie Mellon. I don't think I'd call CE a "watered-down hybrid"... in CS you don't learn things like how out-of-order execution works (or much architecture at all, beyond the very basics). At CMU, EE includes a lot of analog signals and DSP stuff. I'd consider CE to be things like digital design and computer architecture.
Programming is a large part of microprosessors
you have to understand programming to build something that runs a program.
FWIW, I could probably do a lot of my job just fine without being a good programmer... though being able to write perl scripts is a huge help. Verilog is also useful. Of course, any good curriculum is going to teach you C programming, and understanding software is a crucial part of computer architecture.
Not exactly, no one "builds" microprocessors anymore. Once the "virtual design" (as you put it) is done the rest is done automatically by software, the software generates the "blueprints" for the actual IC.
That's a very general statement... general to the point where I think it is at least a little bit misleading. You're not going to be using synthesis and P&R to get an Athlon any time soon (well, maybe if you don't mind running at 100MHz ). In high performance (or low power) designs, you still have to do a lot of custom design.
Comp. E is *not* the major you want if you plan on designing microprocessors, or chipsets for the big guys. You want to be a dual major EE and Physics (probably want to do a bit of study in thermodynamics, and Chemistry too) guy for that. As an EE, you'll likely find yourself designing chips for specialized systems in places like Pratt&Whitney, United Technologies Corp, and the like.
That's news to me (and probably would be news to my ECE friends & acquaintances at Intel, IBM, and nVidia). I don't think I would go so far as to say physics isn't useful for microprocessor, but I didn't take
any physics classes in college at all.
If you want to be a hardware designer, persue internships at the companies that make the hardware. From sophmore year on, downright pester NVidia, ATI, Sun, AMD, Intel, IBM, all of them. Get an internship, that's your only real chance at being hired unless you have PhD. Which they will have you get anyways, but they'll likely pay for it.
Don't get discouraged when they all ignore you. Sophomore year,
none of those companies were interested in me. Junior year it was different - AMD flew me down to Austin for interviews, and I got a lot of calls from people at Intel.
I disagree with your suggestion about getting a PhD - almost none of my co-workers have PhDs. One who does have a PhD did his PhD work with something unrelated to what he does now.
Are you SURE you wanna do processor design? VLSI design and whatever lower level design are pretty boring in my opinion. You have to basically draw "boxes" and lines on those design software. Those correspond to the different materials used in chip manufacturing, and you basically end up with tons of transistor doing their jobs. It's not just digital board design where you wire all the gates and components together. Physics is pretty important in this case in my opinion.
That's only one small part of processor design. At AMD, there are dedicated people who draw the boxes and lines - layout people*. There are a lot of other people involved in the design, and a huge number of people who do verification / validation.
For the project I worked on last year, one of the things I did involved reading an RTL (register-transfer level - basically it just means cycle-accurate) description of a functional unit and working out the actual logic necessary, then turning it into gates & transistors. For verification purposes, I also wrote gate-level verilog that matched my schematic closely. I also did a lot of analysis to figure out the best implementation for some of the gates I was using (picking a transistor implementation - the design was not all standard-cell based), then sizing the transitors and gates. The only time I dealt with the "boxes and lines" was after the layout person showed me what he'd produced (so I could use his result to see what should change in the design). Of course, there's a lot of back-and-forth, if I want to change something, or if I design something and it turns out it can't be laid out. There's similar interaction with the people writing the RTL - it might be necessary to change some things if they want something to happen in a cycle but the path is just too long. The "CIRCUIT DESIGN ENGR" job
Lord Banshee quoted is pretty similar to what I was doing.
The project I'm working on this summer is done very differently, and I'm not actually worrying about transistors at all.
There are a huge number of people involved in designing a processor, and the people doing the physical layout are just one small part.
*It's more complicated than how I'm explaining, but the details don't really matter for this discussion.
hmmm :-/ well either way i want to figure it out because i don't want to pick my college and find otu what i was aiming for isn't what i want in the case that i knew what i wanted to do (say comptuer engy) but i picked the wrong way to get there and end up changing schools.
CE is probably a good choice... if it turns out you aren't interested in it, you'll already have had lots of overlap with CS and with EE, so you could probably switch to either of those relatively easily.
eh, I consider myself in the IT industry, but I don't build computers. I help companies implement application that streamlines their business date and transform it into information that will help them make better decision. I consider that "Information" technology.
I think IT and CE are completely unrelated.
no it's not cs related i mean like animation/3dsmax stuff like that..... video animtion (anime tyupe stuff or game design type stuff... graphical.
I would imagine that would be difficult to do along with CE, since you'd probably have to take a lot of classes from the art department.