Back to Where I Belong

i'm back in kharagpur... doing a course on VLSI Design... For starters, VLSI is very large scale integration... and is the term used to describe design techniques where over a million transistors [electronic devices] are fit into probably a cm by a cm wafer of silicon... it's a field which is coming up thick and fast because as computers and other electronic devices achieve higher and still higher complexities, there are a good number of design issues and trade-offs involved... in essence, its a very highly specialized field where no dilettante could make a fortune... u require a minute understanding of logic design, and a meticulous testing and verification process wears most people out...

an example of how costly it can prove to be for organizations... you might have heard about the notorious pentium bug... It was a result of a small approximation by Intel engineers, whereby a small error kept cropping up during float point operations [operations on fractional numbers]... what most people did not realize that it did not affect most people at all... may be caused one in a million operations... only scientists and engineers and financial analysts who required high precision operations needed to be worried... but the frenzy soon caught on... and most people where wary of their computers giving all sorts of wierdo results... ultimately, intel had to take back all those processors, and replace them by good ones... it all cost intel well over half a billion dollars!!! read more about it here and here

So, you can guess how important and difficult a task it is... and i find myself at sea in this vast ocean... with no hint where the next landmass is :((

neways, so much for vlsi.. u must be bored by now... [even i am :D]

chalo will write more later...

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"I have a dream" --- only when i'm sleepin'