What is the difference between IC design, ASIC design, and FPGA design?

IC design is the broad term for designing integrated circuits — the actual transistor-level or logic-level circuitry on a chip. ASIC design specifically means designing a custom chip built for one particular product or function, carried all the way from a hardware description to fabricated silicon, which is expensive and only makes sense at high production volumes. FPGA design targets field-programmable gate arrays — reconfigurable chips that can be reprogrammed after manufacturing — which is the standard choice for prototyping, lower-volume production, and applications where the logic needs to change after deployment, since it avoids the very high upfront cost of custom ASIC fabrication.

Is semiconductor and electronics engineering the same as electrical engineering?

Semiconductor and electronics engineering is generally treated as a specialized branch within the broader field of electrical engineering rather than a fully separate discipline. Electrical engineering as a whole covers both power systems and electronics/low-voltage systems; semiconductor and electronics engineering is specifically the electronics half, taken to its most specialized extreme. Most engineers in this field hold a standard electrical (or electrical and computer) engineering degree and specialize into IC design, PCB design, or embedded systems afterward.

What tools do semiconductor and electronics engineers use?

It depends on specialization. IC and ASIC design engineers use EDA (electronic design automation) software from Cadence and Synopsys, the two dominant vendors in that space, and write digital logic in Verilog or VHDL. PCB design engineers use dedicated layout software like Altium Designer (the dominant professional tool) or KiCad (a free, open-source alternative widely used by startups and smaller companies). Analog designers rely on SPICE-based circuit simulators like LTspice or Cadence Virtuoso to verify circuit behavior before fabrication.

Engineering·9 min read·July 29, 2026

🔬 What Is Semiconductor and Electronics Engineering? A Complete Overview

What semiconductor and electronics engineers actually design and build — IC/ASIC/FPGA design, PCB design, analog and digital circuit design — the core sub-disciplines, how the field relates to electrical engineering, key tools (Cadence, Synopsys, KiCad, Altium, Verilog/VHDL), and typical career paths.

📖Practical ASIC Design & Implementation — Illustrated Guide (Full Access)

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What Semiconductor and Electronics Engineers Actually Do

Semiconductor and electronics engineering is the discipline of designing, building, and manufacturing the chips, circuits, and electronic hardware that make up virtually every modern electronic device — from the microprocessor inside a smartphone to the power converter in an electric vehicle to the sensor circuits in industrial equipment. It's a discipline defined by scale in both directions at once: engineers in this field work at the physics-limited scale of individual transistors etched into silicon just a few nanometers apart, and at the systems scale of a printed circuit board carrying dozens of chips that all have to work together reliably.

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