What does a computer engineer do?

What is the average day for a computer hardware engineer?

• I'm 17 and have been thinking of becoming a computer hardware engineer (electrical engineer more generally). I've been in a class focusing on the profession for a semester now and was wondering what exactly a computer hardware engineer does on most days. Is it mostly paper work? Is it more designing circuits or testing/simplifying? Is it hands on most days or computer software related? I'm looking more of what an intro engineer does (first 5 years or so) rather than management. Thanks so much.

• Answer:

  I am a computer hardware engineer, I help design super computers. What I do every day really depends on what phase of the project I am in. Early in the project I'm in development so I am designing circuits or writing in a special language called an RTL, or register transfer language. This language can be translated into logic gates by synthesis software. Reports about the likelihood of the design being implemented correctly and robustly are continuously updated during this phase as well. The design is continuously verified by simulating it as well. Bugs happen but bugs that are found after the chip has been made are very expensive to fix. Next more software is used to pull all the pieces of the design together and integrate them while obeying electrical specifications and as much of the design as possible is simulated as an entirety. After this the design is sent off to be fabricated into a chip, or ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) and eventually comes back. Once it comes back my days are spent in the lab while the parts I'm responsible for are verified on real hardware and eventually with a real operating system running on it. Usually there are some bugs on large ASICs, it's impossible to simulate the whole thing at once, and these bugs mean more time spent in the lab. Hopefully there are workarounds to avoid the problem (often designers build in hardware switches to enable or disable features that are considered riskier but will yield significant performance improvements if they work correctly). If not then we have to go back several steps, fix the bugs, and fabricate a new ASIC.