I'm Okay...Really.

Those of you who read Trevin's blog will have heard already about VLSI. For those of you who don't, VLSI is an acronym for Very Large Scale Integration and is the name for the processor designing, laying out, and fabricating integrated circuits -- computer chips. HMC's VLSI class is taught by a man who is a legend in the industry and as such is incredibly hard. I'm a computer science major, not an engineering major, so I decided to take the class because I enjoyed the simple digital design class and wanted to learn down to the electron level how computers work. That thirst has been slaked.

When the class started, it was incredibly interesting to me and even though it was a lot of work (we had a 16 hour problem set once...) I was really enjoying it. Now in the second phase of the class we are working as a 14-student team on a single, big project: we're building a 6502 microprocessor -- the chip that was the heart of machines like the Apple II and the Nintendo Entertainment System. This sounds cool, and it is, but my partner and I were brought onto the microarchitecture team and for the first few weeks were slogging through this code that we didn't write and had no idea of how it was structured. The last few weeks have been spent finally understanding the code and trying to fix it. All the while the other teams are moving forward and if they're not waiting on us now, they certainly will be if we don't get finished soon.

I think you'll understand, then, when I say that I'm just done with that class. I can't drop it (not because I'm not allowed to, but because I've got this far and really would like to finish it, and also because other people are depending on me to do my work and if I leave then suddenly someone else has to step in and take over for me), but I'm sure my grade is suffering terribly because of the slow progress we're making and, worse yet, this class is eating into the time I should be devoting to my other classes -- I have little time to be working on robotics, which is still fun, and I have a research paper for a humanities class that I have yet to start. Hopefully we'll get this microcode finished this week so we can start paying attention to other things.

~KMarsh