Re:What if you knew how computers work? (2015)
by TheOtherHobbes on Saturday October 10, 2020 @04:49AM
(#24737568)
You can get a hand-wavey understanding quite easily.
Digital circuits use a fairly simple model, and that's not difficult to pick up.
Analog circuits can use a number of more complex models, and they're more of a challenge, depending on what you're trying to do.
Actually designing transistors - defining dopant levels, topology, and process steps - is a very specialised skill that very few people have.
And modern PC motherboards are marvels of electromagnetic engineering as well as electronic engineering. You have GHz signals running reliably on circuit boards with multiple layers. Getting those to work is another very specialised skill.
So it would quite something to find someone who had a professional-level understanding of all the levels: from silicon chemistry and quantum physics at one extreme, to electromagnetic design, to all the different levels of electronic design, to binary machine language and processor architectures, to OS design and application software, to all the various data structures and encodings that make all of the above useful.
Digital circuits use a fairly simple model, and that's not difficult to pick up.
Analog circuits can use a number of more complex models, and they're more of a challenge, depending on what you're trying to do.
Actually designing transistors - defining dopant levels, topology, and process steps - is a very specialised skill that very few people have.
And modern PC motherboards are marvels of electromagnetic engineering as well as electronic engineering. You have GHz signals running reliably on circuit boards with multiple layers. Getting those to work is another very specialised skill.
So it would quite something to find someone who had a professional-level understanding of all the levels: from silicon chemistry and quantum physics at one extreme, to electromagnetic design, to all the different levels of electronic design, to binary machine language and processor architectures, to OS design and application software, to all the various data structures and encodings that make all of the above useful.