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Starting a new CompSci/Electronics career -need advice!
tggzzz:
--- Quote from: fourfathom on September 06, 2022, 03:41:09 pm ---
--- Quote from: tggzzz on September 05, 2022, 09:55:01 pm ---Shrug. I like to have fun with people that think there is an obvious difference between hardware and software. It is easy to provide counterexamples to their statements, and show them it is a very grey area.
--- End quote ---
That depends on the hardware, doesn't it?
--- End quote ---
To push the point, only at extremes.
--- Quote ---True, much of what was previously done in pure hardware is now done at least partly in digital (analog radio receiver now done with SDR, etc.) but there are still plenty of areas where true analog design is required. I see plenty of obvious differences.
--- End quote ---
Philosophically...
Photon counting and fA circuits are digital :)
Is a modern x86 class chip hardware or software? (Answers on the back of an envelope in a laboratory notebook please) Ditto an FPGA. Or a 22V10 PLD class device?
Practically...
As you noted above, in many projects a given piece of functionality could be implemented using a variety of radically different techniques. Being able to choose a good combination of technologies is a key skill, which a "pure hardware" or "pure software" person is unlikely to have. That can lead to X deciding Y will have the responsibility for cleaning up the messy edges that it is difficult for X to do cleanly. One example of that is the HP/Intel Itanic processor :)
rstofer:
I did a little hardware design contract many years ago. All I had to do was get the hardware working and demonstrate it. There was another contractor responsible for the application code.
Well, that didn't work out! I wound up having to provide device drivers and sample code for the programmer to build against. I doubt that my experience is unique. If you plan to do embedded, you better have your feet on both sides of the river. You will be writing a lot of code. If you're a coder, you will still be expected to understand the User Manual.
fourfathom:
Hardware != Software, but there is a huge overlap.
You guys are talking about embedded designs and coding, and yes that's a big part of it. But it's not the only part. When I was running the engineering department at our startup we had people designing power systems, thermal management, ESD and EMI mitigation, designing processor cards, FPGAs, ASICs, Stratum-2 clock synchronizers, 1.544 and 44.7 MHz electrical interfaces, optical interfaces from 155 MHz to 10 GHz, Gig E, etc. Some of this was analog, a lot of this was digital, some firmware, and then there was software. Some of the FPGA and ASIC designs had internal state machines, but if so those were a tiny portion of the design.
Everything is not a computer!
But if the OP is considering going into image processing, that's going to be almost exclusively software -- the optical / electrical portion is almost trivial in comparison.
tggzzz:
--- Quote from: fourfathom on September 06, 2022, 11:00:21 pm ---Hardware != Software, but there is a huge overlap.
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Some Dunning-Krueger candidates believe there is a fundamental difference, and that they can distinguish between them. |O
Such people don't know what is inside a modern x86 processor or an FPGA, amongst many things.
fourfathom:
--- Quote from: tggzzz on September 06, 2022, 11:48:20 pm ---
--- Quote from: fourfathom on September 06, 2022, 11:00:21 pm ---Hardware != Software, but there is a huge overlap.
--- End quote ---
Some Dunning-Krueger candidates believe there is a fundamental difference, and that they can distinguish between them. |O
Such people don't know what is inside a modern x86 processor or an FPGA, amongst many things.
--- End quote ---
Oh, please do carry on! I'll just watch from the cheap seats.
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