
Integrated Circuits Can Be Easy to Understand with the Right Teachers - szczys
https://hackaday.com/2019/05/20/integrated-circuits-can-be-easy-to-understand-with-the-right-teachers/
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compiler-guy
This video was reasonably good, but still required a lot of background.

If you want really terrific easily understood, yet totally in-depth
information about integrated circuits, starting from the physics how semi-
conductors actually work at the electron level, all the way up through gates
and on to an entire computer, Ben Eater's videos are outstanding.

Most people know his work from the Breadboard computer,
[https://eater.net/8bit](https://eater.net/8bit), where he builds an actual
functioning computer, with instructions and microcode and output, from scratch
on a breadboard, along with terrific explanations.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg. All his videos are amazing, and super
easy to understand. Here is his version of how nor gates work: which is way
easier to understand to me than this video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTu3LwpF6XI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTu3LwpF6XI)

Here is his whole channel:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS0N5baNlQWJCUrhCEo8WlA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS0N5baNlQWJCUrhCEo8WlA)

and his website:

[https://eater.net](https://eater.net)

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empath75
That video is great, thanks.

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hermitdev
I studied as an EE. I struggled as a freshman to figure out how flip-flops
work (building blocks of registers) when it dawned on me while in the shower
that they only work due to propagation delay. What an eye openning shower that
was...

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acjohnson55
I feel like some teacher failed you that this wasn't made more explicit.

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CamperBob2
Eh, it's a subtle point. Unequal propagation delays are how a bistable F-F
finds its initial state, but once static operation is established, only the
maximum toggle rate depends on propagation delay.

And astable flip-flops usually have separate, explicit timing elements rather
than relying on gate charge or whatever.

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hermitdev
I agree. I actually think my instructors were excellent. I had a mental block
that needed clearing. My EE instructors went out of their way to spend as much
time in office hours as needed to students that needed it. I remember spending
several hours in one instructors office trying to figure out where I was going
wrong. She was also confused because all of my intermediate work was correct,
but I always came up with the wrong answer. Short of it was that I was
entering numbers in as reciprocals of what they should have been. E.g. I was
entering 1000 in my calculator instead of 1/1000\. Took 2 sets of eyes and a
couple of hours to spot the problem. Went from barely getting a C at midterms
to not losing a point the rest of the semester. Finished with a solid B amd
the next semester was perfect. Only ended up there because of my instructor's
help and accessibility.

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fatnoah
> I remember spending several hours in one instructors office trying to figure
> out where I was going wrong. She was also confused because all of my
> intermediate work was correct, but I always came up with the wrong answer

In grad school, I was a TA for some undergrad EE courses. We (the TAs) and
professor corrected tests together and whenever we encountered a wrong answer,
we'd always replicate the student's work to find where things went wrong so we
could a) point it out and b) give partial credit whenever possible. For a
class of 120 students, it took four of us two days to get through all of the
tests.

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sneakernets
I was extremely lucky to have learned ICs from a very special man who helped
design/refine the concepts at PARC. Thanks to that, he was able to explain the
entire course from a perspective of an "inventor".

This is _very_ similar to the way he taught, although we didn't have 3D
representations, they were mostly transparencies taped together and layered.
Very cool to see it done this way.

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linker3000
Do tell more

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dotdi
I understood this but I have an EE background. I feel like it would be still
quite difficult to follow even for self-taught makers because some concepts
were missing entirely, like the basic function of the transistors he's
constantly talking about.

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twiddlethingy
IC designer here. Most people struggle to grasp semiconductor circuits because
they think about them in terms of voltage drops when in fact they should be
thinking about them in terms of current loops. With this approach, the scales
are lifted from your eyes.

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alexhutcheson
This is a great insight. It's hard to break the habit of defaulting to the
node voltage method when it's been beaten into your head via practice in EE
labs. In the lab I used in college, something like ~90% of the ammeters were
broken or wrong (mostly due to blown fuses by other clueless undergrads), but
the voltmeters were always reliable. Defaulting to the voltmeter also meant
you didn't have to move things around on the breadboard. I think this hands-on
experience influenced the way I approach circuits even if they are on paper or
a computer screen.

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revskill
Not just about integrated circuits.

I found best teachers are the ones who actually solved real-world problem.
Only then they understood which piece of knowledge is helpful because they
actually understand it.

Teaching is not for the theorists.

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chongli
_How does a purposefully contaminated shard of glass wield control over
electrons?_

It's not a shard of glass, it's a slice of silicon monocrystal. These
materials are less alike than graphite and diamond.

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dgacmu
It's humorous exaggeration/misstatement with a wink. The same way people often
refer to hard disks as "spinning rust".

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mrob
Except old hard disks really did use iron oxide as the magnetic storage
material. Semiconductors were never made from glass.

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Junk_Collector
Oxygen doped silicon isn't necessarily the same thing as glass but it's not
entirely far off either and has been used in semi-conductors. Actual Glass
layers are also a major component in transistor and IC design, so I don't feel
like this is any more stretched than the rust comment.

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rkagerer
Neat exhibit! So sad this could be the last Maker Faire
[https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/05/18/attendees-
bittersweet...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/05/18/attendees-bittersweet-
at-what-could-be-last-bay-area-maker-faire/)

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megous
Easier, perhaps, I doubt it's easy for anyone, ever. Maybe if you work at some
higher abstraction level. But just understanding those bipolar transistors is
quite a challenge. You can measure them, but understading why what's measured
happens...

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sametmax
Anything is though.

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stoppergoo
That’s not understanding integrated circuits at all, that seems to be just
understanding how a device functions on a chip.

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zellyn
I don't understand your comment. They're describing an Integrated Circuit with
several transistors.

