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Comment by wmu | Hacker News Reader

I'm a low-level programmer and it's the first time I come across the linear-feedback shift register. I would say it's rather a part of digital circuits design.

Now, when FPGAs become more and more popular, people will be forced to learn VHDL languages and then different lesser-known techniques will surface. (It's a naive prediction, I know.)

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>Now, when FPGAs become more and more popular, people will be forced to learn VHDL languages and then different lesser-known techniques will surface.

Isn't that already part of a normal CS degree? We needed to learn VHDL to program a Atmel ATTiny for class.

Are you sure you learnt VHDL? As I understood it, the ATTiny isn't an FPGA but an 8-bit microcontroller.

Learning some form of assembly language at university is (probably) reasonably common.

Learning VHDL (for programming FPGAs) is less common - I did for my Computer Science degree, but this was about 15 years ago, so I don't know if it's still common.

Just one data point, but I'm currently at school for Computer Engineering and we learn and use VHDL and Verilog for several courses. We use it to program Altera FPGA's.

Glad to hear it's still being taught! I was using Altera FPGAs too, although I suspect they're quite a lot higher gate count now. (My second year project was an FPGA implementation of the EDSAC computer from the 1940s - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_delay_storage_autom...)

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