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by moritzwarhier
907 days ago
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I have only faint memories of my beginner's course on this topic at university, and absolutely no knowledge. Somehow I remember the word MOSFET. I think the wikipedia articles about logic gates should provide all necessary cross references. "Fully understand" is an elusive term though. How do you fully understand the solid-state physics of logic gates if you don't fully understand all of physics, chemistry, maybe even quantum mechanics... Not meaning to be dismissive though! I love to try to fully understand things and hate having to accept black box logic. But I also have to admit that I've given up on this approach for many things a long time ago. Skimming the course summary, it sounds as if this "Hardware Description Language" might mark the boundary of what this course is about. Makes sense, it's not "from physics to NAND", it's "from NAND to Tetris" :) |
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I walk in on the first day not realizing that while I had done my undergrad in MIS (fun fact: this is a business degree), literally every person in the course was either on the last semester of their undergrad in CompEng or were grad students that already had a BS in CompEng (this school combined some undergrad/grad lectures).
Suddenly i hear the teacher say like "grad students will also need to use an HDL and design a processor compatible with the basic MIPS instruction set." I started at "what's HDL mean?" Teacher responds "If that's a real question then it means: Hurry and Drop this Lecture." Day 1 and I already have the wrong questions for the wrong reasons.
That was a really bad 3.5 months... But it's also proof that if you hate literally everything hard enough, then it is absolutely possible to pull a 100 day "zero to MIPS HDL prototyping" speedrun.