Then I got into industry and saw that each of those steps is done by a different team of people, often at different companies. Most companies doing "chip design" today are buying off-the-shelf processors, system busses, memories, dma engines, network subsystems, sensor interfaces, etc. and just wiring them up. It's honestly kind of just, tedious now. The challenges have more to do with making sure those components are all mated up correctly than in doing any fun design work, at least for everyone on the team except the "chip architect." Working on the verification team is usually more interesting than on the design team on these kinds of projects (but don't tell the designers I said that).

I currently work for a company doing novel digital designs targeting FPGAs. There are still some off-the-shelf parts such as a PCIe, Ethernet, etc. blocks, but a good amount of the stuff I did in school, such as designing state machines, efficient data structures, and instruction sets. It's pretty fun.

It's morosely sad how so much chipmaking requires not just expensive chipmaking, but incredibly restrictive IP licensing. The whole Silicon Foundry model that lead to such prosperity & growth is now gated upon these primitives of computing, that only a handful of companies know how to make. The academics are all downstream of this control, limited in what they can play with, when they don't have access to ram blocks or ethernet or usb blocks.

I'd had some hopes there for a bit that open source chips were going to eventually work around this, that there's be enough interest in commoditizing and making accessible these things, in the way that open source unlocked so much growth in computing. I still hope I live to see such a re-opening happen. But it feels like it's going to be a lot more decades than I was hoping for.

Anybody have some good book recommendations on how to get into chip design (SoC/ASIC/FPGA/etc.) for somebody from embedded software background?