What project are you working on this summer?
Before I answer that question I have to tell you a little bit of history about how computer chips are made. When a company is creating an integrated circuit, a chip for a device like your laptop, they need to test it to death to ensure it works reliably before you buy it. Back in the day, testing something on a chip was quite difficult because the chips had to be fabricated before they were tested. The fabrication was expensive and could take many months and so mistakes were very costly. This cost was the impetus for developing an FPGA, a programmable chip that made testing the chip design prior to manufacture possible. The FPGA can be reprogrammed and debugged multiple times and effectively simulate the functions of the integrated circuit before the chip is manufactured.
That’s the hardware side of the story. The actual device that compiles the circuit and places it on the programmable chip is called a CAD tool, a computer aided design tool. The CAD tool uses hardware description languages, Verilog or VHDL to describe the circuit. The CAD tool compiles your hardware design, places it on the chip in an optimal way and then routes it.
I’m working on the CAD tool itself, helping to develop a better chip compiler.
Ismailimail 