When all hardware becomes just more software, where will the hardware engineers go-to programming school?
I’ve noticed over the last few years that hardware design seems to parallel software design, just delayed by about a decade. All the virtues and vices that programmers discovered in the ’80s are now being uncovered by hardware engineers. High-level languages? What a good idea-for hardware. Compilers? Gee, you mean we don’t have to hand-craft every single transistor? Object-oriented programming? The hardware guys are just now catching on. Hardware design-especially for ASICs and other custom chips-is looking more and more like programming. Hardware weenies don’t draw schematics any more. They generally use a high-level hardware-design language (HDL) such as Verilog or VHDL. A few lines of VHDL “code” looks a lot like a C listing at first glance. You’d never know that the language was describing hardware instead of the control flow of a program. And that’s exactly my point. The hardware-design profession is pulling itself through the same knothole that programmers did 10 years ago. Just
