Welcome to Verilogpro, a place to learn Verilog and SystemVerilog design techniques, coding styles, for RTL design and verification!
My name is Jason Yu (and that’s my wife in the background) and I’m a semiconductor professional in Vancouver, Canada. I currently work at Intel Canada designing and verifying Solid State Drive (SSD) controllers. You may be surprised to learn that, despite being a remote office, and Vancouver not being known for its semiconductor industry, most of the controllers in best-selling Intel SSDs were designed by engineers at my office!
My journey to become an ASIC designer was not a straight-forward one. When I first decided to enter the semiconductor industry after graduating from a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering, I had no idea how to get there. Most universities only offered 2 or 3 digital design courses in an entire bachelor degree, which wasn’t enough to land me a job as an ASIC designer. I found that out the hard way—by failing 3 interviews for digital design positions at 3 different, prominent, semiconductor companies. That virtually ended my job search in this industry at the time.
Not knowing what else to do, I went back to school to pursue a Master’s degree specifically in the System-On-Chip field. I concentrated on computer architecture, and did a thesis project that involved designing a soft processor on FPGA, specifically choosing to learn and code the project using Verilog. While that gave me a great foundation of theoretical knowledge, and more RTL coding practice than most, nobody taught me common hardware design and RTL coding techniques used in industry, or pointed me to such resources. Verification—any form of verification—was unheard of (I needed more than several directed test cases to test my design? Who knew!).
In the first few years of my working career, I continued to have the same questions. My coworkers were very knowledgeable, but like the common cliche—you don’t know what you don’t know—I never knew what to ask. It wasn’t until I discovered industry conferences and conference papers specifically on hardware design techniques and RTL coding styles that I began really learning. Through this website, I hope to explain these topics in an easy to understand manner, do my small part to help students and professionals expand their RTL design and verification knowledge, and learn from you—students, professionals, and visitors from around the world.
Besides semiconductors and engineering, I am also passionate about communication skills and leadership development. I am part of Toastmasters International, and my home club is NightVision Toastmasters. Be sure to check us out if you’re in Vancouver!
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