What drew you to a career in FPGA engineering?
I was drawn into a career in FPGA engineering toward the end of my time in school. I took a digital design course that was super interesting, but they didn't once mention the term FPGA. After that class, I started trying to implement my own DIY circuits projects. I took a class in VHDL toward the end of my time in school and found that I had a knack for it. From that point on, I looked for FPGA career opportunities, and the rest was all on the job training.

Describe a typical day in your role as a FPGA engineer. What are some of the most exciting projects you've worked on?
My typical day as a FPGA engineer changes throughout the project lifecycle. Most of the projects I've worked on start out with figuring out requirements and what your design needs to do. After that, it transitions into writing lots of code and running simulations to make sure your code is working the way you think it is.

Once we have hardware to work on, it switches to top level integration and adding all those building blocks that you've written into one big chunk of code that can run on hardware. Currently, I'm spending about 80% of my day down in the lab, building up new functionality, proving it on hardware and making sure that what I simulated is reflected on hardware.

The most exciting thing that I get to do at L3Harris is knowing the code that I wrote is proved out on hardware and used all over the world on tons of platforms.

What technical skills do you consider essential for success as a FPGA engineer, and how do you continually develop these skills?
There’s a handful of skills necessary to be successful as an FPGA engineer. One would be having a strong grasp of hardware description language. In my case, that would be VHDL. To verify your own code, you need to be able to write test benches and run simulations in a simulator like Questa or ModelSim.

One skill that sets good FPGA engineers apart is a strong grasp of the FPGA technology. That means understanding the building blocks that exist and how the code you write gets mapped to the technology. One thing I really appreciate here at L3Harris in San Diego is the large group of engineers that I can learn from every single day and sharpen my skills.

How do collaboration and teamwork play a role in your work? Can you share an example of a successful team project?
Collaboration and teamwork are essential in my role as a FPGA engineer. I'm currently working on a program designing a new radio that has multiple FPGAs, and there are about two to three engineers per FPGA. Collaboration happens every single day and it's critical to our success. I’m currently working on a piece of common board to board communication code that's going to be used on all the different FPGAs. It requires constant collaboration to make sure what I'm doing is going to work properly on all the other FPGAs.

What challenges do you face in your role, and how do you approach problem solving when things don’t go as planned?
As FPGA engineers, we face daily challenges. Sometimes it's with bugs in my own code. Sometimes it's with the circuit board hardware. Often, it's with the FPGA vendor tools not working the way that you think or how they're advertised. I've gotten much better over the years at staying calm and breaking problems down into smaller, manageable chunks. If I break up a problem, it'll be much less overwhelming than trying to take it all on at once. I've become a lot more comfortable at admitting that I can't figure something out, and I need to reach out to my coworkers for advice before I end up spinning my wheels and getting stuck for too long.

What advice would you give to someone considering a career in FPGA engineering, especially regarding what to expect in the industry?

There are many lessons that, as a new FPGA engineer, I wish someone would have told me. I've had jobs in the past where there was sort of a dead end to how much you could learn on a topic. One thing I really love about FPGA engineering is that it's like peeling the never-ending onion. Every time you deepen your knowledge and learn something new, you peel back another layer and there's a whole new realm that you can explore and master. Some things like digital signal processing, high speed interfaces, cryptography and the list goes on. One lesson to give a new FPGA engineer is to stay curious and keep finding new things to learn, and as you master more subjects, you'll become increasingly valuable.

One misconception that people have about FPGA engineering is that you just sit around in your cubicle writing code all day. And sometimes that's true for parts of the development cycle, but the most valuable engineers can write code for part of the day, write test benches, simulate their code and then get their hands dirty in the lab working on hardware and test equipment for the rest of the day. It's fascinating to write code and then watch the logic that I wrote do something useful on the hardware.

Another piece of advice I would give to someone just starting out is to make an effort to understand how your FPGA fits within the larger system. Ask questions when things don't make sense, because it's better to be humble now and learn than to continually fake it and never master the subject.

Any FPGA engineer who loves what he or she does would be happy to teach new lessons to a newer engineer. I have a three-year-old son who's constantly asking me “Why, why, why, why?” It drives me nuts most of the day, but it always reminds me that curiosity is the best trait to have if you want to be an engineer that can come up with creative, out of the box solutions.

What initially drew you to a career in FPGA engineering, and how did you get started in this field?

I was drawn to a career in FPGA engineering because I really liked that L3Harris has specific new grad positions. I also liked studying embedded systems in college and I feel like the fields are related. 

Describe a typical day in your role as a FPGA engineer. What are some of the most exciting projects you've worked on?

A typical day of an FPGA engineer might include coding, documentation and hardware testing in the lab. I personally liked writing C drivers for FPGAs that have processors. 

What technical skills do you consider essential for success as a FPGA engineer, and how do you continually develop these skills?

It's important to have an understanding of VHDL or Verilog as an FPGA engineer. I continue to grow my skills through mentorships with coworkers and trainings at L3Harris.

What challenges do you face in your role, and how do you approach problem solving when things don’t go as planned?

A challenge I face in my role is that nothing tends to work on the first try, and if it does, you should definitely double check it. And don't be afraid to ask for help because someone else has probably already experienced something similar.

What advice would you give to someone considering a career in FPGA engineering, especially regarding what to expect in the industry?

Overall, I would say that FPGA engineering is somewhat specialized, but it's still broad enough that it can provide opportunities in different fields such as embedded systems, digital signal processing, hardware testing and more.