Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

Re:Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids fo... by BrannonB on Friday June 22, 2018 @06:54PM (#17378202)

If you think Verilog is bad, you should see the languages used by heart surgeons, civil engineers and rocket scientists. The language of human biology is ridiculously verbose without even a hint of polymorphism. ;-)

My point is that it's a little silly to evaluate hardware engineering through the lense of software engineering.

In hardware engineering the part that looks like "software" (what a HW engineer may refer to as the behavioral RTL) is a small component of the total design effort. The tradeoffs are all completely different.

Computer hardware engineering is much closer to designing a bridge than it is to writing a software application. Debating the best hardware-descriptor language is similar to debating whether bridge designers should use No. 1 or No. 2 pencils.

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Re:Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids fo... by krupan on Friday June 22, 2018 @07:08PM (#17378276)

Sorry, but that comment makes it sound like you've either never used pencils, or you have never used verilog.

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Re:Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids fo... by BrannonB on Friday June 22, 2018 @11:34PM (#17379390)

25 years of high performance chip design.

Perhaps you’re an FPGA guy? The tradeoffs are different in that world.

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Re:Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids fo... by allegedganon on Saturday June 23, 2018 @03:16PM (#17382872)

I am not claiming in any way that the problem we face in HW design are the same as the SW folks do. I most certainly agree that RTL is but a small chunk of the overall effort of designing a chip. But I am afraid my point that this chunk is in a terrible place still stands.

You have also entirely ignored my second point :)

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Re:Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids fo... by BrannonB on Sunday June 24, 2018 @01:13AM (#17385052)

Your second point was that HW engineers haven’t learned about sharing—as evidenced by the fact that they use a different term for it than SW does.

Again this is evaluating HW through a SW prism. Where’s github for bridge designers? rocket scientists? brain surgeons?

HW engineers share info in pretty much the same way that every other industry in the world does (except SW). The concepts are made available through patents, conferences, journals, and press releases. More detailed info is often made available through purchaseable IP.

Maybe it could be better, but there are good reasons that HW IP can’t be shared as easily as SW source code.

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