Andrew Green , 01-11-2025, 05:04 PM
Need your advice on how to break into IC design at the age of 34. I got my B.S. in CSE from UNR 11 years ago but I feel like I’ve learned very little. Got an internship that I botched with my poor programming skills and little clue how C++ compilers work. I heard horror stories about crunch in video game industry. Since then I spent years in sales and material handling. Now I want to earn a living designing IC's - controllers, memory chips, etc. The best response I got on Quora and Reddit was that I have to zero in on PCBs or IC's, not both as they require different skillsets. I think starting with IC's makes more sense.My completed projects: - Ben Eater's CPU board, VGA board, EEPROM programmers - a solderless board for plotting pixels on a 16x2 character LCD - a flashlight with a hand-wired prototyping board and a battery Now I want to design and prototype the keyboard encoder, the USB controller, and the PCB circuits (fill me in if I am missing something) for a 3x2 keypad that supports USB-A 3.0 - one circuit at a time, though I'm not exactly sure where to start. Plan: - find work with a PCB manufacturer (I had a shot with TTM Technologies!), - apply for admission into a bunch of colleges in the Bay Area + San Jose State University, - get career counseling, - find the right program, - learn its curriculum, - take some online classes to prepare, - nail the curriculumNot employed by a sponsor, so apprenticeships are out. I would continue on to my M.S. if I retained any interest in much higher-level software and my university credits weren't so old. However, I feel like my heart is much closer to C, assembly, ISA CPU architectures, and development of BIOS routines. I'm OK at Bash, Python, C, and x86 assembly and yet to learn Verilog and CAD and sim tools. I am taking courses on Udemy. Already got a LinkedIn profile and two GitHub repos.Lastly, I got an interview with a Panasonic rep but now my gut tells me it's a waste of time. Thank you.