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How to Get into FPGA Industry

Field Programming Gate Array (FPGA) is a collection of programmable logic blocks that can configured by consumer after manufacturing. It has been evolved and gained much popularity since it was launched by Xilinx Inc. 25 years ago. The FPGA configuration is generally specified using a hardware description language (HDL). There are many big manufacturers in FPGA industry such as Xilinx, Altera, Lattice helping to develop programmable logic easy for consumer than ASIC.

FPGA now, comes with high-speed interfaces and serial communication. They gained popularity over ASIC in terms of flexibility to fix bugs, a shorter time to market and lower non-recurring engineering costs and whereas, ASIC complexity has lengthened development time.



If you want to go in FPGA industry as an engineer, you should be very technical in terms of logic blocks, VLSI design and requires the full interest in this field. Today, FPGA has been implementing in applications such as aviation, consumer electronics industry, embedded systems, bio-medical and many more, so an expert in FPGA will be asked to handle digital system design, system-on-chip, embedded hardware-software co-design, digital communication sub-systems, hardware accelerators for various computing tasks, embedded control systems and digital signal processing sub-systems/systems.

This line offers creative and challenging work, which involves rapid prototyping of design ideas as well as verification of existing designs. Almost any area with design and verification tasks will have a requirement for FPGA trained VLSI engineers to prototype the solutions of FPGA based systems.

Institutes to Study:

- Get Bachelor's degree in electronics, electrical or computer science with proper knowledge of VHDL or Verilog language to design the state.

There are different IITs, NITs, BITS and many technical university in India that you can opt for your Bachelor degree. There is no pressure to have Masters in VLSI but, still if you do you will have an edge in semiconductor industry.

Skills/Traits:

- Good in Digital Electronics design.
- Knowledge of programming language such as VHDL, Verilog.
- An expertise in VLSI design.
- Good domain knowledge of digital signal processing or digital communications, computing architectures.
- Good understanding of the problem with logical and reasoning ability.

Getting There:

- There is no institute that provides special courses in FPGA or VLSI design. You have to opt for engineering after class 12th in Electronics, Electrical or Computer science from esteemed university.

You can learn the HDL to program application for better options in industry. And get training on the basic digital design concept, and design engineering experience required.

Pros and Cons:

- FPGA is booming industry requires more and more engineers in coming years.
- Good to learn and show your ability.
- Requires more learning and dedication in this field.
- More expertise are required compared to other fields.

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