FPGA Growth in the future? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: michvtr
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: June 12, 2016, 01:30:37 am
content: Hi guys, I'm an electronics engineering student and three classes away from graduation. However, I'm not doing well with the general circuit analysis and microelectronics but rather am excelling in the VHDL and Arduino C/C+ programming aspects and earning top grades with little effort. I would agree that if you work doing something that you're passionate about, it has a lesser meaning of work to it. In the future, I'm thinking of moving forward with learning about FPGAs and more about the Xilinx family of products and their ISEs, which I'm currently familiarize with their WebPack which seems to be the simplest. Most likely, I will not find myself spiritually happy with circuit design and will probably not do well when I join the workforce. I do have an internship at the moment which is rather a reliability position, here i just look at led light circuits that were returned and discover whats wrong and how to fix it. But although I'm doing well, its just too bland for me. On the other hand, the FPGA stuff seems to carry a nice reward for hard work, the feeling of getting a gazillion line of codes to just work I find to be just amazing. After getting my BSEE, I plan to save up and take some specialized Xilinx classes provided by the manufacturer to have some more accreditation to my skills. What do you guys think?, do you think that this is a good path for me and what should I do after i'm done with my Bachelors? Will the use of FPGAs growth in the future?, I think that it will especially in the aerospace industry.

author: uncle_bob
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 12, 2016, 02:50:33 am
content: Quote from: michvtr on June 12, 2016, 01:30:37 amHiPealing this onion a bit:1) The wider range of things you understand and can handle, the more valuable you will be. That's true no matter where you work or what you are doing.2) Working with any specialty will *always* involve interfacing with other "stuff" upstream and downstream. You will need to understand that stuff to some degree. If you don't, your design will not work when it goes down on the board. I spend far more time working that stuff out than I do actually putting stuff into FPGA's.3) Specializing on a single vendor *without* a job, to some degree limits the value of your deep dive. There are a *lot* of aerospace outfits that focus on very specific vendors. If their vendor is not the one you specialized on ... less value. The time for the dive is *after* you have the job and know what to dive into.4) Most of the aerospace outfits I work with appear to outsource most of the grunt FPGA stuff and focus more on the on the higher level stuff in house. What they do in house may (or may not) be the part of things that interests you.I would strongly recommend getting out into the field and gaining real world exposure to this stuff. What you do in school often has little bearing on a real world task / job in industry. Many times your success (or lack of) in a given course is a function of the course or the instructor rather than your skills.What's the future of FPGA's ... who knows. They didn't exist when I got out of school. They have been a big part of my life for the last two decades. They may not exist in any form we would recognize in another two decades. The only "sure thing" is that ASIC design will still be with us. For that matter, the whole world of hardware design is rapidly shrinking. To say that this or that is "for sure" is only part of the picture.Bob