Hardware engineering

Hardware engineering is a counterpart to software engineering.

Prof Hum says there are two levels of hardware design:

• Board-level design — synthesis of packaged components using PCB technology, where CAD design is done in PCB tools like Altium. Circuits end up being large (on the centimetre scale).
• Chip-level design — synthesis of structures (transistors, logic blocks) at the chip scale. Transistor-level (VLSI) layout is done in CAD tools like Cadence. Logic-level synthesis uses HDLs. Circuits end up being tiny (in the nano- and micrometre scale).

Sub-concepts

• Electronics
  • Digital hardware
    • Field-programmable gate array
    • CMOS and VLSI
• Printed circuit board
• Application-specific integrated circuit
• Design verification
  • Simulation
  • Testbench