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by rathel 1439 days ago
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.
2 comments
samsoftstuff 1439 days ago
Hopefully, a move towards open hardware standards will help with that problem.

SiFive probably not as worried about interns and NDAs.

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schlauerfox 1438 days ago
SiFive isn't a foundry I don't think, and the foundry process is heavily NDA encumbered.
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msmenardi 1439 days ago
Open standards means alternatives to clunky technology. I'm optimistic
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fithisux 1438 days ago
I agree
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shitpostbot 1439 days ago
+1 to IC being decades behind.

I think the average programmer would be horrified if they really knew the state of modern chip design. SWEs already know how bad most software is, but imagine an entire industry of tens of thousands of people writing code (HDL/TCL), who often don't even think what they do is programming, that has evolved over the last 50 years with minimal interaction with the rest of the software engineering world.

Verilog is a nightmare. The tools are buggy. Everyone has Stockholm syndrome. Version control is considered state-of-the-art and you're lucky if your org uses it.

I've seen a lot of HDL code in my career, and there's a huge number of well respected senior engineers who think having any form of hierarchy, abstraction, or even for-loops is very advanced design practice.

The only good part is the bar is so low it's easy to standout and climb. I think the industry is in a position where it would be surprisingly easy for a startup of seasoned SWEs with a decent understanding of how to write optimized hardware to churn out competitive chips with 10x the velocity of the big players like Nvidia/AMD/Intel

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