[mikewarot]

I think there are two separate areas of concern here, hardware, and computation. I strongly believe that a Computer Science program that only includes variants of the Von Neumann model of computation is severely lacking. While it's interesting to think about Turing Machines and Church numbers, etc... the practical use of FPGAs and other non-CPU based logic should definitely be part of the modern CS education.

The vagaries of analog electronics, RF, noise, and the rest is another matter. While it's possible that a CS graduate might have a hint of how much they don't know, it's unreasonable to expect them to cover that territory as well.

Simple example, did you know that it's possible for 2 otherwise identical resistors to have more than 20db differences in their noise generation?[1] I've been messing with electronics and ham radio for 50+ years, and it was news to me. I'm not sure even a EE graduate would be aware of that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omn_Lh0MLA4&t=445s

[blibble]

the design of FPGAs was certainly part of my CS degree!

they even made us use them in practical labs, and connect them up to an ARM chip

[mikewarot]

I'm glad to hear that. Did you have to learn Verilog, VHDL, or something else in the FPGA programming?