Readit Newsrathel commented on Where Are the Microelectronics Engineers? semiwiki.com/events/31496... · Posted by u/noch
Internships? Yeah, nah. TSMC doesn't hand out technology NDAs to interns, which makes them kinda useless.
All in all, the IC design field is a decade or two behind software dev in terms of ergonomics. They're not going to attract a lot of talent, if the tooling remains as kludgy and unreliable as it is. What if GCC or Clang crashed on you once in a while "just because"? That's the reality of IC design flow.
On the flip side, the world at large has just realized the importance of chips, which makes the outlook mildly positive.
rathel commented on Designing Billions of Circuits with Code asianometry.substack.com/... · Posted by u/picture
EDA software provides the infrastructure for projects with very high NRE and with low tolerance for failure (you can't just recompile and deploy a new chip design for free when you've already built a million bricks). Their entire business model is built around risk avoidance, so it would require an enormous improvement in efficiency for a client to take a risk on a "disrupting" startup's tools.
Yes, BUT... Each new technology node (excluding shrinks) already disrupts the flow in many breaking ways. Seemingly small changes, new DRC requirements, the need to model more side effects all cooperate to make porting to a new node all but easy.
rathel commented on Designing Billions of Circuits with Code asianometry.substack.com/... · Posted by u/picture
Having worked in EDA in the past it's kind of interesting that inside of the big 3 EDA companies (Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor Graphics) the culture seems to be very averse to change. For example, where I was working we had a C++ codebase that was mostly from the 90s. C++ templates and STL were verboten, they had their own non-templated containers from the 90s (this was in the 2006-2012 timeframe). We were using a version of gcc that was always about 7 years old. Similar for the ancient versions of RedHat we were running. Given how important EDA is to chip design you'd think there'd be more openness to innovation. The other thing that was frustrating was how siloed things were. There were software components that I'm sure other groups within the company had developed, but we were never encouraged to reach out to find out what might already be available - in fact it seemed to be discouraged. There wasn't some kind of central code repo within the company where we might look for such things - each group had their own repos that weren't accessible from outside the group.
The culture had a sort of "old boys club" feel. A lot of the folks working there had been there for 15 to 20 years or more - maybe this was what contributed to that, I'm not sure.
At any rate, EDA is a very interesting area to work in if you're a software engineer because there's a lot of advanced algorithmic work to do that you don't get much of working in other industries. But the way they approached that work was just not very interesting (old tools, old methodologies, etc). I suspect things are different in EDA startups, but unfortunately, they tend to be perpetually starved for cash - it's not an area that most VCs are familiar with; the time to payoff is much longer than for web startups. What tends to happen is that a startup EDA company will develop a product that falls outside of (but complementing) what's currently offered by big EDA and then they will try to get the attention of Big EDA and get bought by one of the Big 3 - that's the measure of success, not going public as would be in other industries because it's been extremely rare for EDA startups to go public since the big 3 have become established.
Rest assured that one of the companies you mentioned has deployed a catalog of reusable software components not long ago. It's already quite populated. But the funny thing is, you need VP approval to submit your modules.
I agree that EDA companies are unnecessarily siloed and dated in many places.
Weren't it for the moat of hundreds of PhD's working on the algorithms, it'd have been disrupted to hell by startups.
Same with PostgreSQL:
https://www.paulnorman.ca/blog/2016/05/improve-your-st-geoha...
rathel commented on Spain Plans to Invest $12.4B in Chips, Semiconductors bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/melenaboija
I wonder what will come of it. Portugal had Chipidea which was somewhat successful, to be later acquired by MIPS and sold shortly after to Synopsys.
rathel commented on Receiving FLEXlm Error -88,309: System Clock Has Been Set Back (2020) community.flexera.com/t5/... · Posted by u/picture
FlexLM --- certainly gave me a bit of nostalgia from all the time I spent on it as a cracker few decades ago... I guess it's still found on very expensive/specialist software which hasn't become entirely service/cloud-based.
Cadence and Synopsys use it.
rathel commented on An Old Vendor-Antagonizer Finally Gets His Comeuppance madned.substack.com/p/ven... · Posted by u/mad_ned
Sadly, the "cocktail party test" part is so true. How am I supposed to be proud of my work between that and "this one asshole customer" from Japan? (Tier 1's from USA are demanding, but reasonable).
We are woefully underappreciated industry. While we're B2B vendors, it's no rent-seeking sales-driven crap. It's actual innovation 1-3 years ahead what's in consumers' hands.
However, I think it is slowly beginning to change - with news about "chip sovereignty" initiatives and AI helping design SoC's going mainstream. People now realize how crucial ICs are when car factories close.
rathel commented on Intel in talks to buy GlobalFoundries for about $30B reuters.com/business/inte... · Posted by u/hi5eyes
Their “ideas” on social justice and everything else they have to say should be questionable at best, and intentionally misleading at worst.
I would encourage you to find role models who are more than just good at distracting people from their criminal activities.
I am however positive she should have stayed out of crypto. Everybody in this space becomes at least morally gray at some critical point, even if they started well-intentioned.
But regardless of CE's intentions, you're posing a philosophical question: should we evaluate worldviews for what they are, or by who is possessing them. I lean towards the first one.