I’m not much of a gamer but this is interesting
126 karma · joined October 22, 2015
This + boards from OSHPark or Advanced Circuits' 33/66 each deal were a great way to cheaply get started with PCB design.
A few months ago, I built a rudimentary unpowered exoskeleton similar to the Ekso models, and it did help with carrying heavy loads once I got past the initial awkwardness of wearing it.
1. Processes, which involves lots of materials science, chemistry, and low-level physics. This involves the manufacturing process, as well as the low-level work of designing individual transistors. This is a huge field.
2. Electrical circuits. These engineers use specifications given to you by the foundry (transistor sizes, electrical conductance, etc.) and using them to create circuit schematics and physically laying out the chip in CAD. Once you finish, you send the CAD file to the group from #1 to be manufactured. Modern digital designs have so many transistors that they have to be laid out algorithmically, so engineers spend lots of time creating layout algorithms (called VLSI).
3. Digital design. This encompasses writing SystemVerilog/VHDL to specify registers, ALUs, memory, pipelining etc. and simulating it to make sure it is correct. They turn the dumb circuit elements into smart machines.
It's worth noting that each of the groups primarily deals with the others through abstractions (Group 1 sends a list of specifications to group 2, Group 3 is given a maximum chip area / clock frequency by group 2), so it is possible to learn them fairly independently. Even professionals tend to have pretty shallow knowledges of the other steps of the process since the field is so huge.
I'm not super experienced with process design, so I'll defer to others in this thread for learning tips.
To get started in #2, the definitive book is the Art of Electronics by Horowitz & Hill. Can't recommend it enough, and most EEs have a copy on their desk. It's also a great beginner's book. You can learn a lot by experimenting with discrete components, and a decent home lab setup will cost you $100. Sparkfun/Adafruit are also great resources. For VLSI, I'd recommend this coursera course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/vlsi-cad-logic
To learn #3, the best way is to get a FPGA and start implementing increasingly complicated designs, e.g. basic logic gates --> counters --> hardware implementation of arcade games. This one from Adafruit is good to start: https://www.adafruit.com/product/451?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIhKPax..., though if you want to make games you'll need to pick up one with a VGA port.
Silicon design & manufacturing is super complicated, and I still think that it's pretty amazing that we're able to pull it off. Good luck with learning!
(Source: TA'd a verilog class in college, now work as an electrical engineer)
In favor of free trade: Cheaper goods for me.
It all boils down to "which collection of policies help me maximize my stuff?" Most people seem to take a more pragmatic approach, valuing tangible things over intellectual consistency.
I have mixed feelings about the custom footprint service -- I've worked with ~900-pin BGA SoC-type parts, and paying $30 to do that would be a no brainer, but paying the same for a 8-pin LDO would be a tougher sell -- maybe scale prices with part complexity?
The tougher sell to me is trust / verification of the InstaPart models before the community can vote them up or down. For most teams that I've been on, the most time-consuming part isn't really the pinout generation, but rather the checking of large parts (often 2 engineers checking pin-by-pin to ensure that footprint matches data sheet). I'd be much more comfortable using it if you outlined how pinouts are verified before sending them out to the customers.
I hope this works out! Making footprints is a huge PITA, and I'd love to be rid of it.