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>Robert Plamondon wrote:
>| and have a lot of system administration experience as well, so it's
>|possible to dump the engineering spec on my desk and run
>
>They give you *specs* ?? Now that's what I call hand-holding! :-) I
>sometimes get jobs where they have been coding like hell for six months,
>then the boss (or a customer) suddenly decides they need a spec.
Yeah, things are cushy on the semiconductor side :-)
The test and verification engineers can't do their job if there isn't a
spec, and even the IC design engineers expect one, so things tend not to be
as free-form as in the software world. In addition, there's a long
period -- at least several months -- between tape-out (when the design is
sent to the manufacturer) and volume shipment to the customers. In this
period, the functional design of the chip CAN'T change, except for the
discovery of bugs.
So there's a convenient catch-up period inherent in semiconductor
documentation. Not that the Sales force ever sees it that way. They want
it all documented practically before it's designed. But at least there's
time to fix the problems in the "Advance Data Sheet" (which comes out before
the chip actually exists) and turn it into the "Preliminary Data Sheet"
(after you've seen at least prototype chips). The next step, "Final," is
rarely achieved in this life.
