Hello guys! I recently wrote an article detailing how I self-learned to design finite state machines (FSMs) in Verilog. I'm hoping to include it in my portfolio to strengthen my chances of landing a digital design job. However, I'm unsure about the quality of the writing—would anyone be willing to review and give feedback?

 

I don't think it's very reasonable to expect/hope that people looking to hire digital designers are going to be willing to read a twenty-seven page treatise on how you taught yourself something that they are going to expect you to know how to do. It's hard enough to get them to read a two-page resume for an entry-level position.

In addition, the people looking at your portfolio are going to recognize the "elevator" project as a common homework assignment in a digital design class and see that your elevator model is as simplistic and unrealistic as most such assignments are when the expected effort is a week or so -- after all, consider that your final code amounts to about two pages of code with about three-dozen non-trivial statements. Furthermore, you don't even attempt to address real-world considerations such as what happens if the system ends up in an undefined state. You appear to ignore them, which will probably result in a bunch of inferred latches.

If you want to get them to notice you by means of projects in a portfolio, do a non-trivial, real-world project that is somewhat unique and has some kind of interesting challenge. It should be something that requires many weeks, if not a few months, of fairly serious effort (i.e., it should be something comparable to a full-up undergraduate senior design project). Then boil the description down to no more than two or three pages that gets their attention in the first couple of sentences, making them want to know more about it -- which they can do if they call you in for an interview to ask about it.

 

I don't think it's very reasonable to expect/hope that people looking to hire digital designers are going to be willing to read a twenty-seven page treatise on how you taught yourself something that they are going to expect you to know how to do. It's hard enough to get them to read a two-page resume for an entry-level position.

In addition, the people looking at your portfolio are going to recognize the "elevator" project as a common homework assignment in a digital design class and see that your elevator model is as simplistic and unrealistic as most such assignments are when the expected effort is a week or so -- after all, consider that your final code amounts to about two pages of code with about three-dozen non-trivial statements. Furthermore, you don't even attempt to address real-world considerations such as what happens if the system ends up in an undefined state. You appear to ignore them, which will probably result in a bunch of inferred latches.

If you want to get them to notice you by means of projects in a portfolio, do a non-trivial, real-world project that is somewhat unique and has some kind of interesting challenge. It should be something that requires many weeks, if not a few months, of fairly serious effort (i.e., it should be something comparable to a full-up undergraduate senior design project). Then boil the description down to no more than two or three pages that gets their attention in the first couple of sentences, making them want to know more about it -- which they can do if they call you in for an interview to ask about it.

Thanks! Yes I know it is very simple and I dont have much faith on it. Really what I tried to show is my skills to explain or learn something fast (considering I came from IOT engineering), If you dont mind, could you give me some ideas of projects I could start to work with?