How to stay current without a job

[Haji-]

What do you suggest to stay current with ASIC, DFT, and other technical stuff while being out of work. Hardware tools are not available over the Internet to practice, what one can do to stay current?

Thanks.

 

[Miguel Gaspar]

Now is a very interesting era. Webcast are the solution.
I recomend you to register in the web in the Industries, EDN and others associations that promote webcast.

 

[epilote]

Haji, there are quite a lot of open source IC design tools, which you can use for keeping yourself up-to-date. Particularly with Linux Fedora there is a package named Alliance, which includes tools for analog design such as schematic capture, NGspice, waveform viewer. There are also free Verilog simulators: Icarus and CVer.
You also can consider free spice simulators for PCB (LT Spice from Linear Tech) or demo versions of commercial tools such as Symica (Symica.com).

 

[birdy123]

Hi all.

Most of the freeavaliable tools are related to frontend.. what about backend??