Should we have a follow-up banquet to discuss electronics industry work in LA?

Last Sunday, a meeting of Russians and Ukrainians living in Northern California was held at the Mountain View hacker club (1, 2). The meeting was of particular interest in the discussion of chip design work: register transfer design in the hardware description language Verilog, verification/testing, FPGA prototyping. Later, while discussing the meeting on Facebook, the question arose “are you planning to hold a similar get-together in Southern California?” I thought “why not”, since I will be in LA at the end of the month anyway, since my youngest son transferred from CalPoly to UCLA and I am going with him to orientation.

I have roughly outlined the program, taking into account the meetings in Mountain View and previous experience of seminars in the countries of the former USSR:

1. The essence of the technology: how does designing chips using Verilog code differ from programming?

2. What trick makes it possible to change the electronic circuitry in an FPGA after the factory?

3. What does designing a chip for a phone or router look like in a company: distribution of roles in a team.

4. How can you transition into these professions if you originally studied to be a programmer?

5. Practical exercises with FPGA boards: drawing all sorts of figures on the screen by changing the design.

The length of such a presentation can vary, but for LA, three hours would be optimal: from 11am to 2pm on Saturday, August 31 (I'll be at UCLA from Wednesday evening until Saturday, and have an 8pm flight).

The event can be made free (as part of the development of the community of immigrants from the former Soviet Union region), that is, I just need to find some kind of premises. If I remember correctly, in LA there are Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, Armenian, and Azerbaijani centers. Some hall at a Russian store, a West Hollywood analogue of “Samovar” in Mountain View – will also do. I plan to bring a dozen FPGA boards and three laptops in my suitcase, so the only additional equipment I need is a large monitor for demonstration.

One option might be to make a version of such an event not for an adult audience, but for high school students in one of the local branches of RSM (Russian School of Mathematics) – I'll send them such an offer, maybe they'll be interested. I've experimentally verified that this is possible with schoolchildren – see the video of a schoolboy who came to my meetup in Mountain View and figured out how to work with an FPGA board in three hours:

Some pictures to illustrate the program plan:

The essence of the technology: how does designing chips using Verilog code differ from programming?

What trick makes it possible to change the electronic circuitry in an FPGA after the factory?

What does designing a chip for a phone or router look like in a company: distribution of roles in a team.

How can you transition into these professions if you originally studied to be a programmer?

Practical exercises with FPGA boards: drawing all sorts of figures on the screen by changing the design.

You can contact me via email yuri@panchul.com, on Habr in a personal message or via Linkdin to discuss ideas for such meetups. I will also be at Maker Faire in Vallejo, California – Verilog Meetup member site already online.