Searching in Google

                We always looked up to google for our academic works, whether it be assignments or seminars or presentation materials or help with projects or what ever else you could think about.We could save a lot of time on googling if we google the thinks we need the right way.

   Heres one way that helped me save a bit of time finding materials on google.

             Generally we look for material in specific format whether it be doc or pdf or ppt. We could narrow down the search results by following a simple searching term.

             For example if we are looking for pdf file on specific subject like signed arithmetic. We could do it by modifying the search term to "filetype:pdf signed arithmetic " This will narrow down the search results to only pdf files that have words signed or arithmetic or both.

Heres the example

So to find doc file its filetype:doc signed arithmetic
     to find  ppt file its filetype:ppt signed arithmetic

                   

              Also there is an interesting search tool in google that is google scholar  which will help us in collecting materials for academic purpose. We could narrow down search results based on author names or title or date of publication etc.

Screenshot of Residue Number System search result on Google Scholar .

                     Its always good to collect material from known and trusted sites rather than beating around the bush. But there is nothing wrong in spending sometime googling for it.

       

Career in FPGAs

Read an interesting article on a technical forum electronicsforu about avenue into the field of FPGAs.

For those who don't know what FPGA is - it stands for Field Programmable Gate Array(FPGA) , is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturing—hence "field-programmable".


Here are some of the highlights from the article.

            As per semiconductor industry data, the total global programmable market was worth close to $5.1 billion in 2011, with $4 billion coming from FPGAs.

            India will grow as a market for engineers equipped with FPGA skillset. In the coming years, engineers equipped with FPGA skillset will be in demand at two levels—technology/block development and implementation.

          There is scope for career in  FPGA field not only in  manufacturing of these , but also working for organisations that design around FPGAs. These include Cisco, Juniper, Samsung and Tejas Networks. Firms like National Instruments, Wipro and Infosys too have divisions for FPGA engineers.

          A professor from IIT Bombay explains the role of an FPGA engineer: “A fresher’s job will involve activities like testing, emulation and verification, while an expert in FPGA will be asked to handle digital system design, system-on-chip, embedded hardware-software co-design, digital communication sub-systems, hardware accelerators for various computing tasks, embedded control systems and digital signal processing sub-systems/systems.”

Payscales for FPGA skill sets

Some of the Institutes that offer training in this field are Sandeepani , Veda-iit , CDAC .

You can read the complete article by clicking on this link.