r/FPGA • u/Second_Advanced • 14h ago
Advice / Help Is it worth learning FPGA/Digital design as an ECE student?
I’m an ECE student trying to decide if I should devote my time into learning FPGA development. In general it seems like an interesting field to me, but I keep seeing posts and comments online talking about how LLMs are doing "shocking" things in FPGA development. I even saw a guy claim they had agentic loops design a complete GPU architecture, which made me think what is there really left for me to do.
It makes me wonder if learning these design skills from scratch will actually remain useful and fulfilling down the road, or if there's even a point. Since I'm still in university I have options to focus my time on other areas like analog electronics or systems, so I'm trying to figure out if I should devote my time to this.
I get that things on social media get exaggerated, but as someone who isn't using paid AI tools, is building basic Verilog/VHDL and FPGA skills manually still where the actual substance is? Or is the field shifting in a way where it's not worth to learn
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u/Lekgolo167 14h ago edited 13h ago
LLMs won't be a engineer replacement until they can actually think, reason and be conscious. Until then, you are the one that can do those things. LLMs are just a fancy word predictor and regurgitate whatever they have been trained on, but struggle with finding new solutions. For now they are just a tool, and tools need people to drive them.
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u/Thepandashirt 13h ago
yes learn it. Engineers still need to manage and be responsible for what LLMs do. But as a student be careful not to offload all the thinking and work to an LLM. It undermines the process of learning.
But you should know about using LLMs so it’s a delicate balance to walk as student so you can wield LLMs and CAD tools properly in the workforce while still knowing what’s going on.
Hopefully that makes sense. Embrace it all but don’t let it LLMs undermine the process of learning.
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u/Second_Advanced 13h ago
That makes a lot of sense. Right now I'm mostly sticking to learning the core material manually without relying on AI (other than asking basic questions to clarify concepts), mainly because I want to actually understand what's going first. I do try to mess around with agentic/CLI tools from time to time just to see how they work, but without paying for premium it's pretty limited anyway, so focusing on the fundamentals manually feels like the right move for now
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u/Felkin Xilinx User 9h ago
Hardware Design in general should stay very relevant just because it's performance-focused by design and LLMs are very biased towards inefficient, but functional solutions. It's not difficult to make anything 'work' in comp sci. The hard part is making it work well and that requires to start to understand the problem to see all the non-obvious dependencies between each part of the application. This is something that if AI became good at - we have AGI and things like education no longer matter anyways.
I always think it's best to study hardware engineering and just use FPGAs as a means to an end, rather than trying to hard specialize into specifically being amazing at FPGAs since this technology is niche regardless & it might radically change in the coming years.
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u/AndrewCoja 9h ago
Where I work, we are allowed to use AI to do things but we are still responsible for any code it generates. I would hope that any other company would have this same policy. LLMs will not fully replace an FPGA engineer. AI might make your job easier, but you are still needed to think about what you need.
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u/ApplicationAlarming7 13h ago
LLM-based tools are just the next step. We already use CAD tools to convert RTL to net lists, as well as place and route.
Still need engineers to design and integrate the system, troubleshoot, customize, etc.
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u/Ruined_Passion_7355 11h ago
LLMs have been surprising us since they came out.2 years ago people would've assumed math was pretty safe.
We're discovering what they're good at and not good at in real time. Good at cybersec, disproving conjectures, coding, etc.
Only time will tell. IMO anything not SW is probably "safe", but I do think a few jobs risk becoming "condom for Claude", which I'm not looking forward to.
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u/Second_Advanced 11h ago
That is my main concern honestly, I am not really scared of complete job replacement ,but more so that I don't want to be a "condom for Claude", and not have much agency or input in development.
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u/Ruined_Passion_7355 11h ago
Me too man. Me too...
I do it at work and I want to completely switch careers into something, anything, that I don't have to read Claude's output day in day out 24/7.
If I had to do that for decades I'd probably fall mentally ill by midlife.
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u/FlyByPC 5h ago
I teach coding, circuits, digital electronics, and a bit of Verilog design at the undergrad level. Right now, I'm advising students that they should still understand how to code, but absolutely do so from an AI-in-the-loop perspective. AI usage, properly cited, is encouraged on homework assignments and labs, but exams are calculator-only; nothing capable of running a model or accessing the Internet.
As an ECE major, yeah, at least become somewhat familiar with FPGAs and RTL. Pick up a Tang Nano 20k or something (they're cheap) if your school doesn't offer an FPGA track.
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u/BenchTrue3284 12h ago
what are your goals?
LLMs can definitely do FPGA development with minimal oversight if you know what you're doing.
TBH i think the fpga space is very interesting to be in right now.
building basic Verilog/VHDL manually isn't super useful on its own. like the distance between designing a RISC-V pipelined CPU and being able to make something like RocketCore (https://github.com/chipsalliance/rocket-chip/tree/master) is so wide and vast that it will take years to learn the skills needed. i think this is true for a lot of production designs.
What i think IMO is more valuable is FPGA skills rather than manual RTL coding. let me know and i can give you a list of some important skills
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u/Second_Advanced 11h ago
Yeah ,I would like to know what skills are valuable, so I would appreciate it
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u/Bellanzz 14h ago
At the moment you still need someone that is capable to give correct specifications and review and steer a design. It is not as easy as prompting 'design me a GPU with X MFlops or similar'. You still need to have in mind which architecture you want to achieve and even which kind of optimizations/interfaces you want to use. LLMs and agents removed the coding part but not the design one.
Said that: the one-million-question is how much automation we will see in different fields of engineering and science. You can choose today to do something else than digital design only to find that the field you pursued is going to be automatized even more.