taking advanced courses on VHDL and FPGA programming

[michvtr]

Hi guys, I'm almost with EE school and have been proficient in some areas and not so much in others, what I do very well in is VHDL/FPGA programming, although the material that I dealt with was rather basic having taken a required Intro to VHDL class. Interestingly, that is the only VHDL class offered at my university, I guess it hasn't taken a important place in the industry just yet. So, I decided to dial up some course providers namely Doulos which provides courses with a signed certificate and everything from Intermediate VHDL to SoC design. The courses come in series and are in other states which travel and overnight stays are necessary. They cost around 2 grand for 40 hours of courses/instruction which doesn't seem too bad compared to college tuition. It's very fast pace and more set in a boot camp style for coders kind of way. If I take these courses and be out of thousands of dollars, would you think it'd be beneficial for me in the process of landing a VHDL/Digital Logic Engineer or FPGA Engineer Job? let me hear your thoughts and thank you in advance.

[rstofer]

I don't know if the courses would help your resume' or not.  Were I an interviewer, I'm not sure what I would think.  It's good you went out and got some more training but what was the level of the training?  I don't think 'for pay' schools are highly regarded at the engineering level.  My own feeling is that they cater to technicians.  I am probably completely wrong!

Maybe there's a grand project as part of the training, something you can use for "show and tell".  If not, I would think you should create something of significance and bring both the project and the code to the interview.  I have no idea what a 'significant' project might be.  My choice, were I to do something like this, would be to create a CPU and some peripherals, something for which an operating system might be available, or write a trivial OS like CP/M, and package the whole thing up in a briefcase.  Maybe a little 80x25 display with keyboard, perhaps a compact flash for the disk drive, something like that.  It probably wouldn't be a Z80 because that has been done.  I don't know...

At the undergrad level, I wouldn't expect to see more than a semester dedicated to FPGAs and that would probably include both Verilog and VHDL.  I doubt that it would include a significant project but maybe...