Carreer Advide Needed, please help!!

Hi

I am currently a Place and route engineer for a big company, and have been considering becoming a Digital Design engineer. P&R can be repetive after while... I know verilog, SDC and such, and have intermediate understanding of RTL. Do you guys think this is a good idea? Is it feasible? Do you think this is a good career move? I am basically expecting more pay and more interesting work and hopefully not so many crazy hours. Any comment, though, idea, feedback etc is appreciated.

Are there any books you would recommend be to read to learn more about digital design?

Bomar

Bomama said:

Hi

I am currently a Place and route engineer for a big company, and have been considering becoming a Digital Design engineer. P&R can be repetive after while... I know verilog, SDC and such, and have intermediate understanding of RTL. Do you guys think this is a good idea? Is it feasible? Do you think this is a good career move? I am basically expecting more pay and more interesting work and hopefully not so many crazy hours. Any comment, though, idea, feedback etc is appreciated.

Are there any books you would recommend be to read to learn more about digital design?

Bomar

Click to expand...

https://www.google.com/#q=digital+logic+design+book+free+download

Seems to result in quite a few free logic design books. I've also seen copies of the Digital Logic Design by Morris Mano, but I can't determine if these pdfs are copyright violations, as I haven't checked on the publisher and authors websites.

As a career move it's mostly whether or not you are good at design and where you are in your career. If you've only been working a short amount of time, now would be the time to switch. If you've been working as a P&R engineer for years and are already a senior specialist then it's unlikely you'll make as much initially as a digital design engineer.

You'll definitely have more interesting work as you can work in numerous fields, DSP, wireless, control, space, defense, instrumentation, etc. Each field though comes with a lot of study to understand the concepts used. As a design engineer you'll be expected to learn those concepts or have an already existing knowledge of them (preferably the later if you want to get a job that pays).

Beyond that without knowing your real skill set, I can only recommend that you make sure you will like digital design work.

A lot of what I do is write specifications, draw block diagrams, look at trade offs of different architectures, write synthesizable Verilog RTL code, write testbenches, run simulations, run place and route using vendor tools (I mostly work with FPGAs), debug misbehaving designs in the lab after system integration, etc. I would say that significantly less than 50% of my time is spent writing code (both RTL and testbench) most of it's spent in the specification, architecture, and testing against the specs (in both simulation and in the test lab).

hi Bomar
in my experience its always how you can help the company that determines your pay etc. there are very few people if any in the corporate world who will pay you more and teach you the job. So if you are in the beginning of your career , changing the field should not result in too much pay hit. In other words, you can easily make up for the salary hit by working very hard in the first two years or so. But if you have 10+ pnr years, you are already considered an expert. I do not agree pnr job can be repetitive. I dont think this is universally true. If you are working for a standard microprocessor company, then that statement could be correct. But nowadays chips are used everywhere. From finding oil , military , aviation , medical , industrial, auto and numerous wireless products. So depending on the product line , pnr job should vary too. The tool , flow, strategy, process , constraints, library , pdk rules all change . Eg: a wireless baseband product may be speed sensitive but not so much on power/area. A wireless smartphone audio chip may be the other way (power/area more critical . audio speeds are not fast ) . Its a very big misconception that pnr job is repetitive. If you like you could try a different company to taste different challenges. A digital design job is no easy. It has nothing to do with writing RTL. It has more to do with converging from spec to silicon . You need i.e to be an all-rounder. Which basically means more work hours and lot of stress before tapeout. But i agree you learn more versatile skills. You can also think about working closely with the designer and learn from him/her. Anything is possible but everything needs lot of sacrifice and passion ...

There are many points you need to ponder about.
1.It is PNR which is getting more complex as we move further down the technology node.
2.Very few companies hire people to write fresh RTL. Most of the time, they reuse old RTL after making a few tweaks.
3.A PNR job pays more than a RTL job.
4.The number of openings for RTL positions is less compared to that of PNR.
5.An RTL job definitely has more variety than a PNR job(multiple domains & technologies).
6.More paperwork than computer work is required for an RTL job. So no need of expensive tools and licenses. Just a spec in PDF and some blank sheets.

When I first started out in digital design, I used the following books as Bibles:
1) Advanced Digital Design with the Verilog HDL
2) FPGA Prototyping By Verilog Examples

That being said, I used the published papers by Sunburst Designs to learn/experiment with advanced topics such as clock domain synchronization and reset techniques
1) Clock Domain Crossing (CDC) Design & Verification Techniques Using SystemVerilog
2) Asynchronous & Synchronous Reset Design Techniques

first Question - Why do you want to goto RTL design ?

PNR and RTL design both are different , RTL design is more creative job where you need to think out of box. I am not saying its very difficult or you cant do it ... but PNR guys having more opportunities than RTL design guy.

Think carefully before taking a decision , its life time decision.

Rahul J