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hunter

Joined: 25 Mar 2003
Posts: 6

25 Mar 2003 19:38 job hunting

Hi, all
I know it's not a right place to post, sorry for any inconvenience.
For some reason, a SR. ASIC Design engineer is looking for an ASIC Design opptunity. currently I live in Silicon Valley,ca,US. have almost ten chips successfully tape-outs(under .18, timing critical) including some big chips came from big company, such as yamaha, ubicom, toshiba etc. Focusing on back-end,took charge of P&R,verification,Power Analysis, timng closure, foundry interface. very good person to challenge the timing critical, multi-million designs. cause I used to be front-end designer. Apollo/SoCEncounter are as the main P&R tools.

details according to some of my chips:

dsp: 600K,330M, 0.13um,
risc cpu: 400K,300M, 0.18um.
network chip: 500K,250M, 0.15LV.
network chip: 5M, 240M, 0.13um,12clock domains, 6power domains.
SOC chip: 5M, 200M, 0.13u, (ongoing)

any information will be highly appreciated.

mitaka

Joined: 18 Feb 2003
Posts: 57
Helped: 1
Location: Bulgaria, Canada

25 Mar 2003 21:13

how old are you?

Robby

Joined: 24 Jan 2002
Posts: 46

25 Mar 2003 22:26

Hello,

sorry for my intervention.
Till now I have thought, the age is not crucial in the US. Is this snow from the last year in the mean time?
I'm from Europe.

Robby

flatulent

Joined: 19 Jul 2002
Posts: 4856
Helped: 292
Location: Middle Earth

25 Mar 2003 23:25 not age as an end

I suspect that age in itself is not important. It is an indicator of total experience.

hunter

Joined: 25 Mar 2003
Posts: 6

25 Mar 2003 23:57

mitaka wrote:

how old are you?

7years experience, mature enough to handle the following design, young enough to chanllenge the high-end, multi-million, timing critical designs.

hierarchical design methedology.
die size: 9x9
pins: more than 400
clock: 12 clock domains
main freq: 240M
foundry: 0.13um, tsmc

mitaka

Joined: 18 Feb 2003
Posts: 57
Helped: 1
Location: Bulgaria, Canada

25 Mar 2003 23:59

i'm not an employer and i'm far away from USA.
just curious how old may be a men with such an experience.
and i wondering is it worth to become asic designer,
i'm not finish my education yet:)

rx300

Joined: 02 Mar 2002
Posts: 61

28 Mar 2003 5:24 Re: job hunting

It shouldn't be hard to find a job in CA with your level of experience, unless your requirement of compensation is very high.

Lately I noticed one trend: all the IC companies are moving jobs to India/China. The company I work for has set up an R&D center in India where they hired > 500 ASIC designers. Of course the company has been reducing the number of ASIC designers in US locations. Maybe in a few years, ASIC jobs in US will be very rare. It's sad, but it's very likely to happen.

rx300

srik

Joined: 09 Feb 2002
Posts: 167

28 Mar 2003 12:11 Re: job hunting

rx300 wrote:

The average salary of ASIC designers in India is around $400 per month, (annually $5000). This is true with other services like IT and financial services.

sutapanaki

Joined: 02 Nov 2001
Posts: 488
Helped: 19

28 Mar 2003 14:37

there is one thing I keep asking myself when it comes to IC design - what would be worth pursuing with respect to the future trends - digital ASIC design or analog/mixed-signal design. I consider designing digital functions on transistor level, especially for high-speed as mixed-signal design. What do you think?
Also, any idea how's the job market for analog designers in the Silicon Valley?

rx300

Joined: 02 Mar 2002
Posts: 61

28 Mar 2003 15:09 Re: job hunting

[/quote]

The average salary of ASIC designers in India is around $400 per month, (annually $5000). This is true with other services like IT and financial services.[/quote]

These numbers look too low. I know many US companies pay at least $20K/year for an ASIC job in India. Somebody must been ripping off engineers if your numbers are real.

srik

Joined: 09 Feb 2002
Posts: 167

28 Mar 2003 17:45 Re: job hunting

rx300 wrote:

The average salary of ASIC designers in India is around $400 per month, (annually $5000). This is true with other services like IT and financial services.[/quote]

These numbers look too low. I know many US companies pay at least $20K/year for an ASIC job in India. Somebody must been ripping off engineers if your numbers are real.[/quote]

maybe for top management guys,
but for junior and middle guys even @intel, @ti, @philips,
@motorola,@ad,@st....... the figures are correct.(give or take $200)
So the companies dont seem to be sad..

hunter

Joined: 25 Mar 2003
Posts: 6

28 Mar 2003 18:57 Re: job hunting

rx300 wrote:

It's tough time in US, especially in Silicon Valley, too many guys got layed off, almost 100:1 for one opening, and the war made the situation even worse. Although you are good enough, but how can HR guys identify you from that many candidates? I am not sure whether there are any Engineer manager or HR guys in this board, if any, can you describe the basic flow to hire engineer? could you give me some hint?

hunter

Joined: 25 Mar 2003
Posts: 6

28 Mar 2003 18:59

sutapanaki wrote:

Same thing, except for RF IC designer.

flatulent

Joined: 19 Jul 2002
Posts: 4856
Helped: 292
Location: Middle Earth

28 Mar 2003 19:05 HR people

Unfortunately, HR people are selected for their skills in understanding the employment laws and not for their skills at recognizing the quality of job candidates. As a result they are unusually poor in this area. I suspect that Albert Einstein would get his resume thrown in the trash by most HR people.

I know of a case where the world's first ranking person on a product area done by a company has his resume thrown away by that company's HR department.

sutapanaki

Joined: 02 Nov 2001
Posts: 488
Helped: 19

28 Mar 2003 19:41

hunter wrote:

sutapanaki wrote:

Same thing, except for RF IC designer.

Why is the Silicon Valley different from other places in US and Canada? I've been looking at job postings arount and my impression is that there are more openings for analog/mixed-signal (not RF) than digital. But I might be wrong as well.

flatulent

Joined: 19 Jul 2002
Posts: 4856
Helped: 292
Location: Middle Earth

28 Mar 2003 19:47 silicon valley

What makes silicon valley different is several things. There are several top engineerng schools in the area (Stanford, UC Berkeley) and several regular grade ones. All of these turn out trained workers who like the local area and want to stay. I have been told that there are 5000 technology companies in the area to hire them. This area was originally agricultural and so there were no non-engineering companies. This is probably the only place in the world where there are square miles of engineering only companies.

sutapanaki

Joined: 02 Nov 2001
Posts: 488
Helped: 19

28 Mar 2003 23:25 Re: silicon valley

flatulent wrote:

No, no, I meant why is RF so much sought after in Silicon Valley and not just analog. While in the other parts people seem to look for mixed-signal as well as RF. Digital design is another story. I think there are too many digital engineers out on the market now looking for job.

flatulent

Joined: 19 Jul 2002
Posts: 4856
Helped: 292
Location: Middle Earth

29 Mar 2003 0:40 don't know

I am not familiar with silicon valley to that detail. How do you know that there is a shortage of RF people there? One of my old friends works for a RF consulting firm there and they are short of customers. Another of my friends has friends there working in RFIC development. They are going ahead in designing chips they hope someone will buy because they have not had paying customers for the past year.

sutapanaki

Joined: 02 Nov 2001
Posts: 488
Helped: 19

29 Mar 2003 0:43 Re: don't know

flatulent wrote:

Well, I don't know for sure but that's what Hunter said above - it is the same bad situation for digital and analog except RF.

hunter

Joined: 25 Mar 2003
Posts: 6

29 Mar 2003 2:47 Re: don't know

sutapanaki wrote:

flatulent wrote:

Well, I don't know for sure but that's what Hunter said above - it is the same bad situation for digital and analog except RF.

actually it is slightly better for analog and mixed signal designer, and RF IC(not RF) is the best. from HR point of view.

cin

Joined: 15 Dec 2001
Posts: 83
Location: Cupertino

29 Mar 2003 3:35

What is the chance for fresh graduate with a Master Degree to get a job in ASIC or VLSI in U.S. these day ?
Many of my friends can't find any jobs after graduation. The only ones got the jobs are those who have "CONNECTION" Sad

flatulent

Joined: 19 Jul 2002
Posts: 4856
Helped: 292
Location: Middle Earth

29 Mar 2003 4:01 friend's experience

One of my friends over there says that the employers are looking for a long track record on the exact product type. Experience on similar things does not count.

mitaka

Joined: 18 Feb 2003
Posts: 57
Helped: 1
Location: Bulgaria, Canada

29 Mar 2003 22:09

anybody can tell me what is the situation in canada or in europe

sutapanaki

Joined: 02 Nov 2001
Posts: 488
Helped: 19

30 Mar 2003 3:25

mitaka wrote:

anybody can tell me what is the situation in canada or in europe

Canada is basically the same as US. Almost no hiring, just here and there. I see more analog positions than digital. I don't know how's in Europe. How's in BG?

ahgu

Joined: 19 Jun 2001
Posts: 170

30 Mar 2003 4:23 so sad

so sad, what will they do after so many engineers graduate? find a job in burger king?

I thought analog takes a lot of experience. I see numerous opening for analog ic design in my area. digital are few. RF is very stable, it takes long time to train analog and RF engineer. You cannot jump that quickly like java, c++, verilog/vhdl programming. I think the demand for these engineers are at least stable, the number of these engineers cannot increase as fast as programmers(verilog/vhdl/c/c++/java).

A little funny story from chips designed from India where companies use cheap labor to do most of the logics. I guess the logic inside might work well if we get to test them, however, peripheral consideration was not considered, things like power supply, clock, reset, it takes extra logic just to reset the chips, and the chip can be easily broken with no protection schemes insides. basically we had to gave up the chip after prototype, it was waste of time. And that company has very good reputation(world class company) up to now. It is bad practice when management try to save money this way. Also, I heard a lot of good engineers from these companies left for smaller startup, what remains are just mediocre. Thru my exprience with one BIG semi companies, I notice more ladies running arround doing core engineers work(definitely more than before). And from the decline of quality of their products, I really hate to make the correlation. Well I guess mainly 2 reasons:
1. you try to save money by outsource hardware design, but you lose something in the middle. Sometime it is not as easy as writing database program. these pure software products. I know India produces a lot of good programmers, things like for database, now networking routing, but hardware/ic wise, I don't know. Taiwan definitely have more background in that area.

2. The BEST engineers left during the tech hype last couple years and they are not likeyly to come back. And it really takes time and opportunity to train these BEST engineers.

well, the fact is life sucks for us engineers at this time. maybe try to do some military stuff, make small handheld bomb that you can easily shoot down fighter airplanes. There are a lot of demand there. who knows, maybe WWIII is coming. okay, enough ranting, Please don't accuse me, consider this as bushit.

qlyus

Joined: 10 Sep 2002
Posts: 39

30 Mar 2003 4:43

Verilog/VHDL are not programming languages. They are used to describe hardware, or digital logic more specifically. This separates real good hardware designers from so called Verilog/VHDL programmers.

flatulent

Joined: 19 Jul 2002
Posts: 4856
Helped: 292
Location: Middle Earth

30 Mar 2003 5:11 feedback system

The job market is like a big feedback system with delay and nonlinearity. It oscillates. There is a shortage of some types of workers. People in school train for those jobs. This is a 4-8 year delay depending on what degree they get. Once there are enough workers for the job there are still 4-8 years of new workers coming on line with no jobs for them. DSP was once an area with more jobs than workers. Now it is the other way around.

Another aspect is the number of independent designs being done for a market. In the past each company did their own system engineering and hardware development in the hopes that they would get to market first and become the standard. Now the companies cooperate and set up standards for everyone to meet like 802.11. With no dreams of being the market leader and everyone having a share of the same market all making the same equipment, fewer companies are willing to risk large funds.

Another problem is managers. They frequently cannot evaluate job applicants properly and hire the biggest boaster instead of the most talented person.

I have seen many companies doing things the hard way because they cannot understand suggestions from talented consultants. One company used an 8 bit data collector because they wanted to do simple low pass filtering in DSP to smooth the data. Had they done the filtering in passive analog hardware they could have used a slower 12 bit data collector and gotten the data accuracy they really wanted.

srik

Joined: 09 Feb 2002
Posts: 167

30 Mar 2003 5:43 Re: so sad

[quote="ahgu"]
A little funny story from chips designed from India where companies use cheap labor to do most of the logics. I guess the logic inside might work well if we get to test them, however, peripheral consideration was not considered, things like power supply, clock, reset, it takes extra logic just to reset the chips, and the chip can be easily broken with no protection schemes insides. basically we had to gave up the chip after prototype, it was waste of time. And that company has very good reputation(world class company) up to now.quote]

This may be true in one of your case. I know chips designed from India which have
done very well and used even in military applications.
Do we have the statistics to make objective statements?

or
Is there a postulate like cheap labour=low quality work

flatulent

Joined: 19 Jul 2002
Posts: 4856
Helped: 292
Location: Middle Earth

30 Mar 2003 5:59 another data point

Here is another data point on low cost development. A group of people in Eastern Europe decided to get into the RFIC business. They learned how to operate the controls of the design software. They, however, did not know about losses in on chip coils from metal resistance and coupled energy into the resistive substrate. Their IC did not work because the oscillator did not.

Here is a story about the job market oscillation. One of Captain Cook's decendents was in engineering school just prior to the 1929-39 world wide depression. When he graduated the common knowledge was that the industrial revolution had come to an end and there would be no engineering jobs in the future. he went into the clergy instead. After the 1939-45 war he decided to start a land surveying company in Los Angeles USA. He made much more in surveying the land in that rapidly developing region than he would have in an ordinary engineering job.

ahgu

Joined: 19 Jun 2001
Posts: 170

30 Mar 2003 17:33 srik

To srik:

just a personal observation in one case. I did not make the "cheap labor=lousy work" statement as you did.

But like buying goods, if you pay more mony, the chance is much higher that you will get a better product.

Also I see from common sense that it is harder to manage/coordinate when you have a project partitioned like that, from a engineer management point of view.

BTW, off shore are getting very expensive after M$ and oracle move to India big time and started to hire like crazy. But a lot of time it is middle man getting the money. Like one company I know, they are paying $60/hour to india support, the indian worker get merely $5/hour, the $55 goes to some infrastructure(like computer cost, phone) and traveling and medical benefits, and middleman(pimp)'s pocket. Now people are actually saying it is actually cheaper to do things/hire people local.

Well, I guess eventually, everyone arround the world will enjoy the same living standard, at least same pay for same work. unless one country control all the world resources by force. That is why I say we should look into weaponry and put us on hire on the global scale. like "outsourcing your n*ke project to us for $#B", or "outsourcing anti-F## missiles projects to us for $$$" , sorry, some bushit guy just made my imagination go wild.

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