Oxide and Friends

Integrating Hardware and Software Teams

Jul 12, 2022

01:43:06

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: July 11th, 2022

Integrating Hardware and Software Teams

We've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for July 11th, 2022.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our esteemed guest was Jon Masters. Other speakers included Nathaneal Huffman, Tom Lyon, Dan Cross, Rick Altherr, Matt Keeter, Peter Corless, Timon, Siddharth Joshi, Bob Mader, Aaron David Goldman, Simeon Miteff, Remy Goldschmidt, and MattSci. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

@4:32 Fostering of mutual hatred between hardware and software people
- Huge difference in cost of errors in both time and money
@9:38 Dealing with perishable pre-preg material Tachyon 100G
- Tachyon 100G
@15:06 The black magic that is DDR
- DIMM training demo
@21:58 Open source tooling for EEs
@33:18 Matt Keeter's take on ECAD tools
- Eagle CAD
- Smaller breakout boards made with KiCad for unit testing
@36:55 Timon's take on EE curriculum
- Math-heavy electrical engineering curriculum
- Arts of Electronics
- Knowing at least basics of adjacent disciplines goes a long way
@49:03 Software shouldn't pierce abstractions in order to work reliably, but people should to deepen their knowledge
@1:04:54 Making microchips at home
- Sam Zeloof, maskless-photolithography
- Jeri Elseworth, making microchips at home
@1:06:05 Oxide gets a Pick'n'Place machine?
- Open Hardware Pick'n'Place machine
@1:09:40 Bob's take on silos
- SMM, System Management Mode
@1:22:15 Vintage gaming as an intro into embedded software
- WiFi Game Boy Cartridge
@1:26:14 Fabs at UNI
@1:29:40 Intel Tofino (TM) Series Programmable Ethernet Switch ASIC
- Intel Tofino
@1:31:13 Google's open source high level synth. (HLS) tool XLS

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!