Hardware

You spend a summer designing a piece of computer hardware for a trading firm, writing the chip's design as code and testing it until it works. This is an internship in the hardware team at Jane Street in London. The team designs chips that run parts of the firm's trading systems, because a well designed chip can react to the market faster than software on an ordinary computer.

The team works on two kinds of chip. An FPGA, a field-programmable gate array, is a chip whose circuits can be reprogrammed after it is made. An ASIC, an application-specific integrated circuit, is built for a single purpose and cannot be changed. Either is described in RTL, register transfer level code, which sets out how data moves through the chip on each tick of its clock.