Hardware product development process, what good hardware engineers need?

Computer hardware such as PCs, mobile phones, cameras, routers, switches, servers, and other products are based on hardware boards, and hardware engineers are designing qualified boards. Before doing EMC, I felt that the hardware engineer was nothing more than a copy of the reference design. The schematic was connected, and later I found it was not.

I am a student who has not yet embarked on a social life. He has unlimited passion and hobbies on hardware, and has unlimited ambitions and longing for the future. He does not have rich project experience and social experience. Therefore, he wants to acquire a profound philosophy of life in this article. With professional rumors, then I urge you to refrain from watching it. Otherwise, I'm afraid I'll be smirked by you.

Only with this document for those students who have just embarked on the road to hardware and are still embarrassing, I briefly recorded my learning experience and some of my own experience in the meantime, in order to avoid a beginner to detours or detours.

I always want to express my thoughts in the shortest possible terms, and I want to say what I want to say to beginners, but I can't always do it.

I also know that everyone’s time is precious, and I don’t want to waste time on meaningless things. So I put the words I want to say first in the form of outlines at the top of the article. If there is no time, every officer only needs to look Look forward to it. First, introduce the next hardware product development process, as shown in the following figure:

The hardware engineer is an important member of the R&D team. The hardware product R&D team is roughly composed as shown in the following figure:

What good hardware engineers need:

1. Unlimited passion for hardware 2. Digital circuits, analog circuits, protel, etc. (high frequency and other knowledge I have not used yet) 3. C language 4. SCM (assembly language) 5. FPGA (including verilog/vhdl, sopc) 6. ARM (including embedded operating system, it is recommended to learn UCOS first, suitable for beginners) 7. DSP

1. Learning microcontroller, the simulator is essential, there is no little impact on the programmer, it is recommended that you buy a universal plug-and-play board, build their own system to test. If there is an oscilloscope, then that would be ideal. It will help us analyze and solve problems, especially when doing serial port experiments, interrupts, and I2C EEPROM reading and writing.

2. Learning FPGAs, then you can't get a chip just like learning a microcontroller. There are not many pins like the 51 type one-chip computer, but the FPGA is different, there are often dozens or even more than a hundred pins, so this time we must buy a development board in the market.

I use the development board of the EP1C20 cycloone series of altera company. It was purchased by people in our office and it is now used by me.

It is said that it was 5,000 yuan, or it was bought when the university planned. It is of course good to have good conditions, but for those of us who are generally beginners, it is sufficient to have a development board with commonly used functions. There are still about 1,000 yuan on the market. 3.ARM Learning, of course, is also inseparable from the purchase of the development board, last time gave me two guide recommendations to buy one for me, he readily agreed, let me pick one, I chose Zhou Ligong's smartarm2200, 1980 Yuan RMB, the goods have not come yet.

Learning the arm, the embedded operating system is indispensable. There are many operating systems, the most used is linux, from which developed uclinux, armlinux, etc.; followed by ucos.

I recommend learning ucos first. It has less code and is easy to learn. If you have Altera's nios development board, you can also learn about ucos. Altera's nios IDE supports several RTOSs, including ucos, which is used directly. 4. DSPs are at a relatively high level and have higher requirements for people. The price of development board should also be expensive, I have not used it yet.

Most of us do not have this spare cash. Students can find a few like-minded classmates to buy, and they can discuss it together.

If the school lab has something to do in the laboratory, if the tutor has to look for the tutor, in short, do not miss any possible opportunities, comrades must know that our destiny is in our own hands, since the choice of hardware The road must go down conscientiously, not only to go on, but also to find ways to go well. Enthusiasm is not the only reason. Another reason is that the laboratory provided me with a good learning environment. When learning the SCM, the lab has a ready-made Winbond 51 microcontroller, a Welfare simulator, an advanced labtool 48uxp universal programmer, and a 120,000 oscilloscope. Buy a universal board and find the book on the top. Now.

From simple led flashing, digital tube display, pwm to interrupt, serial communication (single-chip microcomputer and single-chip communication, single-chip computer and pc communication), I2Ceeprom reading and writing, A/D conversion, temperature measurement, etc., it gives me a sense of achievement. Every experiment through the search for information, the preparation of the program and debugging, and then to solve the problem later, the sense of accomplishment and joy of heart only those who have had this experience can experience.

It is this enthusiasm and hobbies that often stay in the lab for 12 or 3 hours, usually after dinner in the cafeteria, directly to the laboratory, back to the bedroom at 9:30 (10:00 in the office building). Although there were no major projects at that time, each of these small experiments was also an accumulation of knowledge in life. With this accumulation of knowledge, I wanted to lay a foundation for future larger projects.

When I first entered the lab, my second guide gave me a development version, which was Altera's nios ep1c20 cyclone series development board. It was bought at the university and was 5000RMB. So began my fpga learning road.

Before I studied verilog, I just stayed at a purely theoretical stage and wrote a few small programs. I used quartus-ii's own simulation software to simulate it.

Simulating with simulation software can often give you the results you want, but once downloaded into the chip, problems will follow. Like MCU learning, everything is difficult.

The first experiment I did was to light the led. Write your own program (few lines only), compile, pin assignments, emulation, and then use the jtag download line to connect to the development board and pc and download the sof file to the chip.

Now think about how simple this is a few steps, but for me at the time, it took a lot of time and effort to find information and immerse myself in experiments.

Especially the allocation of pins, only say that you need to do this against the documentation, but why do you want to do this? There wasn’t too much thought at the time and I just wanted to see the results of the experiment. With the results I had infinite sense of accomplishment and passion for experimentation.

So when I saw that after my efforts, led in my first fpga experiment according to my intentions, the kind of joy and how to achieve led flash when learning the microcontroller is how similar.

This is also a practice and an experience for me to do experiments. It is reading books while experimenting, finding problems in experiments, encountering problems or principles in finding related documents. I'm used to hands-on, if you let me sit in the experiment Even if it was a one-day purely theoretical book, my head would explode. Hehe, because I didn't read books so much, my head never exploded.

And I also used this method to learn ucos embedded operating system later, I call it "ladder sense of achievement".

With this kind of enthusiasm, he later learned fpga bit by bit, the design of some conventional logic circuits, including logic gates, data selectors, codecs, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division operators, shifters, and later. Slightly complex circuit design, including FIFO, digital stopwatch, frequency meter, state machine, traffic control, card telephone billing system, and UART. Start learning sopc. From the minimum system hardware platform to the preparation of a simple led flash program, to the sof file running on the chip, watching the led light and off, my heart has been filled with unlimited heat.

Every time I touch new knowledge, I have a heartfelt excitement. Every time I touch new things, I start with the simplest LED flicker. From MCU to fpga to SOPC to uCOS, only a small improvement every day. Let me have the enthusiasm for the work, only this small daily visible "ladder sense of achievement" can stimulate their pursuit of more knowledge.

I have been studying ucos embedded operating systems for a while now, mainly in FPGAs. Nios has been transplanted for us and does not need to modify any files. You can use it by making some corresponding settings in the nios user interface. Many templates provide us with several good examples inside the template. Task management, semaphores, mailbox delivery, event flags, and time management all provide us with a good template.

What we need to do is to read it carefully, study it, and if necessary, make some changes to the template to accomplish its own function. This is a higher situation of imitation, and it absorbs some of his things and transforms it into his own. I think this is something that hardware enthusiasts and beginners are very happy to do. While studying fpga, I encountered things that were stalled, progressed, and depressed. At that time, you knew nothing about the underlying hardware and couldn't even understand the basic schematic. Not to mention how the program was running on the development board.

When the development of nios was carried out later, this sense of frustration grew day by day and there was no progress at all. It was a long day, and now I remembered that I was glad that I was not desperate and I did not lose confidence in the hardware I loved. Later, there was a turning point in the incident.

Once I chatted with an engineer in my office and talked about my emptiness. He suggested that I learn the MCU first and build my own hardware platform to start with the minimum system. The engineer was enthusiastic and helpful. He always answered with patience and I benefited from learning.

What I want to say is that when we have problems, when we feel that things can't move on, we might as well change the way we talk to people around us. In my environment, my tutor is a senior researcher with nearly 30 years of hardware development experience. I didn’t know anything when I started, but I always like to go to my tutor’s office to chat with him. There are always many ups and downs in life, and our study is as well.

At this time, we must take a look at Ren Zhengfei’s letter to Huawei employees “To live a happy life through difficulties”, where we can find a good reason to live; when we look at something, We need courage and enthusiasm to welcome it. When we encounter difficulties, we must communicate with others, or go online and look at Li Ka-shing’s “are you ready” for young people, where we can learn modesty, Courage, wisdom, perseverance.

Personally think that hardware engineers need more knowledge reserves, there are many technologies and knowledge in the field of electronic information, and people need continuous learning. I would probably list some of them as the direction I have learned since I started working. Of course, I will not be able to learn more in-depth issues in my work.

The last few points

The greatest advantage of hardware engineers is that they can involve various problems in the R&D work and learn the knowledge in various fields. This is the cornerstone of growth, and it can be concluded from time to time that problems can be considered from the perspective of the entire product.

Someone who says that anyone knows a bit is destined to be an ordinary hardware engineer, but we must all understand that this is the basis of hardware engineers. But we also need to be experts in our own field, so we need to be very technically aware of an industry.

Personally I think there are two areas that are worthy of in-depth research. After the era of the Internet of Things, there will be more and more applications of networks and wireless communications.

1. Network: Applications and networking such as switches and routers. Now that the Internet is based on Ethernet, the 802.3 standard specifies MAC and PHY specifications. The upper layer protocol such as TCP/IP, UDP, ARP, ring network, etc., in short, the water of the network is very deep, it is worth exploring.

2. Wireless communications: Applications such as mobile communications, WIFI, sub 1GHz, etc. will become more and more popular. Before the country released any tourism plans, one of them was to implement free WIFI coverage. Wireless communication is also basically a family of 802.x protocols. Both baseband and RF can be studied in depth.

I am also very confused now, I do not know to go that way, but one is the same that is learning, hardware engineers need to keep curiosity and continue to learn new knowledge. I do not know what suggestions fans have, welcome to tell Xiao Bian in the comment area.

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