FPGA engineers: Keep your dreams or follow the reality

From: http://www.eefocus.com/ilove314/blog/12-04/246588_a995d.html

Last night, I accidentally saw an interview with the latest hot "the youngest professor in history" on a news channel. However, one of his colleagues gave an intriguing explanation of the Dream "reality. In general, it means that "after a hard time to get into a dream University, our parents have worked hard to pay tuition fees, but we have chosen the easiest credits to earn, we have lost the pursuit of our dreams in order to get a good job ". Perhaps this is a true portrayal of us, which was once under employment pressure. What should we do after a number of years of hard-earned, satisfactory, or accommodating jobs? Is your dream far away in your mind?

I saw an interesting psychological age test on Weibo a few days ago. The question is, "What are you most afraid of losing ?" There are several answers, including family, marriage, work, and dreams. I chose my dream without hesitation. I smiled proudly-"I must be young ". No suspense, finally gave me "25", younger than the actual me. O (partition _ tables) O Haha ~, I don't know if you will not hesitate to give such a "young" answer when you have been out of campus for several years. Maybe in a few years, we will not be young any more. The 90 s around us will spring up like mushrooms and look at their silly strength. Do you still vaguely remember that we were so old? However, will we keep our dreams and expectations? 45 A month is not short for anyone's life. In the past 45 months of work and study experience, it may not be too much to turn to two different jobs, however, I can understand the difficulty of being an electronic engineer. The third time I stood at this crossroads, I had a better balance between youth and experience, without the halo of a famous school or education, but the two books I wrote were my stepping stone, two "pretty" projects are my biggest investment. My experience is not a legend, and I am not a very smart person. However, what I want to boast of myself is that I can do things in a down-to-earth and focused manner. Once upon a time, I thought that when the opportunity was right, maybe I would leave the technology slowly, maybe the technical background would be my advantage. However, my conversation with a senior gave me the determination and courage to go on the technical path again. "You have been right over the years, and you have not taken a detour ...... In any case, technology cannot be lost ". It is also a coincidence with the understanding of this predecessor ,...... (All titles pass together), but now he does not have to worry about getting started with "freelancers". What he pursues is not fame, but a free pursuit of technology. On the other hand, I talked to a friend of HW over the past few years. His conversation and understanding of FPGA are also worthy of praise, unfortunately, under the long-term workload, he admitted, "I'm too tired. Who wants to be bored at the age of 40 or 50 ?" Code By typing on the keyboard, you may get bored with these things ". I'm a little sick. If I love it, why can't I! Of course, if possible, I have the guts to experience this high-load work environment for three or two years, and maybe my thoughts will change. Who knows? Things are always in development, and nothing remains unchanged. They are often in the face of heartless reality. What we say is not counted. Just as 24 months ago, I vowed that I might have been working in a small company that has nothing to do for five years, as well as a clear understanding of personal capability bottlenecks, I once again gave up. Looking for the next station, when facing employers with different styles, it also gives me more mature thinking. In reality, although it is cruel in some cases, the dream is not in conflict with the reality, most of the time, a good balance may make the dream a better "Sublimation ". I once naively thought that I wanted to be an FPGA engineer, just an FPGA engineer. But after looking around, I found that there were very few, very few, or even very few such offers. Therefore, do not think that FPGA has a bright future when you are confused in college. The reality will tell you that "the iron rice bowl is full of clouds ". Why? Of course, this is also based on the current situation of domestic enterprises. In a sense, I personally did a very good job in FPGA, but in other aspects, some of them were weak. After all, my work experience in year 34 was there. How can I work hard, individuals are also limited by time and energy, and are bound to be weak if they are strong. However, most of the companies I have come into contact with in China do not have and are not prepared to set up so-called FPGA engineers in the full sense. Their ideal situation is that hardware engineers serve concurrently, they always want to find a comprehensive engineer who doesn't catch a cold. In a sense, this is the overall environment in China. However, if we look at this problem from another perspective, the business owner's worries are not without reason. If the hardware engineer has some preferences, then his design will be more or less unconsciously closer to this aspect, FPGA itself is good, but the cost is high, and it is not suitable for use in some occasions. Speaking of this, we have come to the idea that FPGA is not widely used at present. In many cases, it is a mandatory choice. You say that communication is used a lot, however, it is a pity that most of them are used for verification before streaming. However, image processing also seems to require FPGA, But I have worked with several companies (the scale is not small ), they do images, but they do not even have their own FPGA engineers, indicating that they are not using FPGA for images. Algorithm Most of the work of the class is the preprocessing of the collection or forwarding of high-speed data streams. Therefore, there are indeed a lot of FPGA tasks, but FPGA is not doing much at the moment. In addition, FPGA can be used, but it should not be stuck in FPGA. This is my new understanding of FPGA. Of course, unless one day FPGA can really reduce the cost to a level that everyone recognizes, and FPGA-based SOC can be comparable to the current various CPUs, but I think this is still not realistic. Today Xilinx's Qaq or Altera's SOC-FPGA may be working on this direction, but I'm afraid they still have a hard time bypassing the cost-sensitive topic. Speaking of this, over the past two years, we have been exploring the strength of FPGA in two projects. Through familiarity with on-chip system architecture and various bus and peripherals, in fact, I think I will have a deeper understanding of embedded systems than traditional hardware engineers. This is an unexpected result of FPGA, but I think, slowly, while continuing to develop into "deep, I will pay more attention to the development of a hardware engineer at the wide layer. After all, my dream is not to be an FPGA engineer who only writes code and runs simulation. I also hope to gradually improve myself to the system level through FPGA, we will weigh the overall situation to deal with different product requirements. The dream is not always a constant layer; the dream sometimes needs to be adjusted and adjusted in a timely manner in the face of reality ......