[HN Gopher] U.S. universities are building a new semiconductor w...
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U.S. universities are building a new semiconductor workforce
Author : mikhael
Score : 196 points
Date : 2023-05-20 06:01 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| jakeinspace wrote:
| I graduated 5 years ago with a degree in computer engineering,
| and have been working since then in embedded systems for
| satellites/aerospace. Currently I'm finishing a masters in CS
| with a thesis in cache prefetching. I started the masters because
| I decided aerospace is probably not the place for me (salary is
| okay but not stellar, very high inertia, hardest problems are not
| control systems and signal processing rather than software). I
| loved computer architecture in undergrad, and I think getting a
| job at a newer fabless chip company like SiFive or Tenstorrent
| would be amazing, but I am wary of all the warnings I read from
| people in the field. Is there anybody here with industry
| experience who has something good to say about working on the
| fabless side of things?
| cushychicken wrote:
| There's an absolute shedload of opportunity, for one thing. I
| run a job board for people who design chips and RTL for FPGAs.
| The pay is good and all companies are hiring RTL designers.
|
| For another, plenty of people who do it love it. This probably
| isn't the place to connect with them. I'd recommend /r/fpga or
| /r/chipdesign on Reddit.
|
| (That job board is www.fpgajobs.com if you're curious.)
| jakeinspace wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion! As someone with little job
| experience doing FPGA work (just a single internship and
| university research), is it that hard to get an offer that's
| not extremely junior level? I'm hoping to leverage my
| embedded experience for a role that involves firmware or OS
| work.
| bsder wrote:
| FAANG jobs still require less schooling, less knowledge, pay more
| and don't require you live in awful places.
|
| Lots of us left the field or retired. Call us when semiconductor
| companies start paying real money.
| goethes_kind wrote:
| When I was being recruited by ASML this is what I thought.
| Investing all the time, money and energy, to then be at the
| mercy of one employer, and have to live in a very specific
| locations, and the salary is not even that great.
| bboygravity wrote:
| SIdenote: ASML, Philips and other Dutch "big tech" are also
| known to make (illegal) cartel agreements on how much they
| will pay for labor.
|
| Source: their (outsourced) recruiters admitting this to me.
| analognoise wrote:
| Ah, that would be illegal!
|
| What is NOT illegal is to all hire the same "outside
| consultants" who give you the same slide deck they give all
| the other employers, that "agrees" to the same wages giving
| them something to point at.
|
| Isn't that grand?
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Sidenote: most companies in most countries do this. They
| tend to align on a standard set of salary grills for the
| region, that are more or less the same between each other,
| to keep competition, wage increases and employee churn to
| the minimum.
|
| This is of course illegal in most places, but to counter
| this in court you need a whistleblower willing to go public
| and expose them with hard evidence, but since the workers
| actively involved in these wage fixing schemes are very
| well compensated along with NDAs, they have no reason to
| throw all that away in exchange for no other company hiring
| them ever again and your ex employer suing your for
| breaching your NDA. Sure, you might eventually win in
| court, but do you really want to drag your family through
| expensive lawsuits against mega-corporations who spend more
| on toilet paper than you can on a lawyer?
| ghaff wrote:
| Is there any company anywhere that doesn't research the
| market rate for jobs to at least some degree? What you
| decide to do with that information is another matter of
| course but I'm well within my rights to decide not to pay
| anyone more than what I've determined to be the market
| rate no matter what other offers they claim to have in
| hand.
| frede wrote:
| In the country I work it goes like this: the employers
| are members of an IT association, once a year each
| employer sends over the anonymous salaries for each job
| title. The associations aggregates them and sends back
| the distribution, which HR then uses as a reference.
| Similar result, but no direct collaboration between
| employers needed. You can even buy the report for each
| position as an employee for a fair price.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| If you're the one setting the market rate, and there are
| no market forces to stop you, it becomes a big problem
|
| As we can see from the current situation where the USA is
| completely reliant on foreign fabs and unable to make its
| own partly due to a shortage of skilled and willing labor
| cultureswitch wrote:
| There's worse, you could be making software for ASML. I've
| heard things worse than Oracle happen there.
| nologic01 wrote:
| the catch is that you can't have FAANG jobs if you don't have
| semiconductors. Greedy short-termism, grab what you can now and
| forget about the future is _always_ what kills the golden
| goose.
|
| unfortunately you can't expect people as individuals to make
| those calls. You need mechanisms that properly value long-term
| sustainability
| NeverFade wrote:
| The fact FAANG jobs pay better means the supply/demand ratio
| for talent that can do semiconductor jobs is higher than for
| talent that can do FAANG job.
|
| GP is right, so rationally everyone who could - would rather
| live in Mountain View and work a FAANG job than live in some
| factory town in the Arizona desert.
|
| Apparently there just aren't enough such people, so FAANG
| will keep paying more and those who can't get these jobs will
| have to take the worse paying position that requires harder
| work, more dependency on a single employer, under far worse
| working and living conditions.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > some factory town in the Arizona desert
|
| Phoenix isn't some "factory town". But your general point
| is true - wages in the electronics sector are stuck at the
| same amount that they were in the 2000s.
|
| That's why companies like Andruil and Tesla can poach
| electronics and MechE talent with still low but not as low
| wages (110-130k with a bunch of stock versus 70-100k with
| almost no stock).
| nsplayer wrote:
| [flagged]
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Way too many confederate flags in the southwest for my
| taste.
| nwatson wrote:
| Tempe, AZ is an awesome place. I wish I lived there
| again, I'd be biking close-by South Mountain all the
| time.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| > and don't require you live in awful places.
|
| Last I checked, they generally d _o_ require you to live in SF,
| Seattle or similarly "awful places". If anything, rampant
| homelessness and crime seem to be highly correlated with cities
| that have "FAANG" HQs.
| vkou wrote:
| If you think Seattle, outside of ~18 square blocks is an
| "awful place" by the definition of even the most dyed-in-the-
| wool WASP, you've either never been to the city, never been
| outside Pioneer Square, or have been eating way too much
| political propaganda.
| MisterSandman wrote:
| San Francisco is still an incredible city to live and work in
| if you're young and don't have a family (which is a huge part
| of the workforce). The homelessness problem is blown out of
| proportion in terms of everyday living (it's still ridiculous
| from a societal point of view, but still)
| zamnos wrote:
| Given that four of the FAANG companies are headquartered, not
| in San Francisco, but in suburbs south of it (Menlo Park,
| Mountain View, Cupertino, and Los Gatos), I'm not sure what
| you're on about. Los Gatos isn't perfect, but it's not some
| haven of homelessness and crime.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| I lived in the bay area for years, in the city, in Oakland
| and in Moutain View for a year. I agree the south bay is
| less chaotic than SF. It's still a lot more chaotic than
| either Colorado, where I was born, or Taiwan, where I've
| spent most my life. To me, the US west coast was always a
| sacrifice of quality of life for career growth.
|
| If you need a code to enter the bathroom at your local
| coffee shop, you might want to consider moving somewhere
| with a bit higher baseline for public spaces.
| bombcar wrote:
| How easy it is to access a clean restroom is a good
| barometer of something.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > FAANG jobs still require less schooling, less knowledge, pay
| more and don't require you live in awful places.
|
| > Lots of us left the field or retired. Call us when
| semiconductor companies start paying real money.
|
| The future will rather be that FAANG jobs will pay much less,
| thus the salaries in the semiconductor industry will become
| somewhat competitive again.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| They'll pay less when they stop making $2 million per year
| per engineer
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > They'll pay less when they stop making $2 million per
| year per engineer
|
| When a company makes 2 million USD per engineer and year
| and can afford to pay less, it will. :-)
| alephnerd wrote:
| Semiconductor salaries are still very low. Intel and co pay
| around 70-100k with marginal stock and bonus for most
| engineering staff. Even seed stage startups pay more. May as
| well become an accountant at that point.
| grumple wrote:
| When that happens, people will just go back into finance and
| other high pay fields that require less education and effort.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > When that happens, people will just go back into finance
| and other high pay fields that require less education and
| effort.
|
| Straight from the horse's mouth I know that quite some very
| intelligent, insanely well-educated (in a relevant
| direction, say, doctoral degree in mathematics, physics,
| stochastics, ...) and hard-working people don't have the
| personality traits that finance is looking for.
|
| I know quite some insanely talented people who could not,
| for example, get a permanent position in research (for
| reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of their
| research) who would, as mentioned, rather stand no chance
| of becoming hired in finance (if I had a startup, I would
| seriously consider hiring them).
|
| So the whole advice of "go into finance" is in my opinion
| divorced from the reality.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Isn't it a real phenomenon that's even been observed in
| pop culture?
|
| https://youtu.be/L_VFXM0mnR8
| grumple wrote:
| You are being too literal here. Firstly, there's a large
| number of software devs that would do just fine in
| finance. A common refrain is that many of those who would
| have gone into finance over the past decade or two want
| into tech instead. Secondly, there's many other fields
| people could go into. People follow the money. They adapt
| their skills to those fields. This idea that "well devs
| will just work for peanuts" is absurd. Intelligent and
| talented people will just go elsewhere if the field is no
| longer a source of high incomes.
|
| Of course I expect it will continue to provide high
| incomes for quite some time. There are few things I can
| think of that wouldn't be improved by software, and as
| long as that holds true it means there's more demand for
| software.
| esalman wrote:
| This is probably a reason STEM graduate level classes and PhDs
| are prominently international students, willing to go on to the
| industry and toil under immigration limbo.
| NeverFade wrote:
| International STEM graduates are also targeting FAANG and
| similar jobs in droves.
| MisterSandman wrote:
| Yes, and no. International grads in the US also want
| stability, and FAANG has proven to not offer that anymore.
| Many Stanford grads I know are targeting pharma-tech and
| health tech companies which still pay well, but have a way
| more stability at the cost of being boring as fuck.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Awful places? I believe Arizona is one of the fastest growing
| populations of all the states ( too hot for me personally )
| alephnerd wrote:
| A lot of that is Californians in skilled trades and back
| office roles who got priced out of NorCal and SoCal. A lot of
| my HS teachers for example moved to AZ to become teachers
| because they could at least afford a home in the Phoenix
| Metro, along with friends of mine who ended up working in
| Sales, Accounting, and Back Office Administrative Staff work.
| analog31 wrote:
| In my view FAANG jobs are beside the point. I've puzzled about
| this a lot, because I'm technically a "hardware person" with a
| degree in physics yet I'm also a good programmer. Many of my
| physics classmates became programmers. I could hypothetically
| bring myself up to speed on the latest software development
| practices and make myself employable at it. Maybe not at FAANG,
| but probably somewhere decent. But I've never made that jump.
|
| I work in an office that has a sizable software development
| department, so I'm quite familiar with what they do, and what
| their work environment is like. It's not some distant
| mysterious place. They're my lunch buddies.
|
| There are also lots of people who are quite bright, and do
| difficult mental work at lower pay, yet don't learn to program
| for whatever reason. Those of us who program know that it's
| actually quite easy, yet is an impenetrable barrier for most
| people, and we just don't know why.
|
| There will always be somebody who makes more than you do, but
| it doesn't explain why people aren't all leaving their jobs for
| higher paying ones. Part of it may be psychological inertia --
| I might be guilty of that myself. But I think another part is
| that we don't actually know the recipe for success.
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| I don't think that Ohio State University is sufficiently
| preparing students to work on semiconductors
| alephnerd wrote:
| Lmao what? OSU has a solid MatSE and MechE program thanks to
| automotive, defense, and aerospace industry hiring practices.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Intel is planning to build an enormous billions of dollars fab
| just miles away. It makes total sense to build up the
| semiconductor education there. OSU is a fine state school with
| a well regarded CS and EE department.
| bombcar wrote:
| They can also go the old "company town" style where they
| train up people for factory work with the promise of a good
| life.
|
| Are they willing to pay what would be needed, however?
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| In Ohio, sure
| mkoubaa wrote:
| There is no shortage of chip design in the US (I'm in Austin and
| I constantly bump into these folks), only chip _fabrication_.
|
| What little I know about fab is that extremely bright physicists
| do rote tasks with horrible schedules. I don't think the solution
| to that is more education
| bombcar wrote:
| Sounds like a perfect fit for a union or an employee-owned
| coop.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Tbh That's the last thing I'd say
| piperswe wrote:
| Why is that?
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Because manufacturing at this scale and precision has
| extremely thin margins and stringent quality
| requirements. A coop would necessarily be more communally
| minded and would be outcompeted by more ruthless
| efficiency seeking operations
| tinglymintyfrsh wrote:
| _Waves from a perch overlooking AUS and Giga Texas._
|
| I've run into enough NVIDIA and AMD engineers at The Domain to
| surmise this is true.
|
| We need a funnel towards training highly-skilled blue-/light-
| blue-collar workers to feed the strategic needs of said fab
| industry if the US were serious about building domestic
| capabilities and competitive independence.
|
| Right now, I don't think the current state of the US education
| system from national to local levels is promoting the
| fundamentals needed to attain this goal.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| Most semiconductor workers can make 20% more working as a
| software engineer, without laboring in a factory. That needs to
| be "fixed" first
| lizknope wrote:
| I've been designing semiconductor chips for 25 years in the US.
| For the last 20 years all the companies I have worked at have
| been fabless. We send the mask data to TSMC or Samsung to
| manufacture.
|
| I sit in front of a computer at a desk all day and get to work
| from home 3 days a week. We get plenty of new grad design
| engineers from college.
|
| But do young people want to work in manufacturing plants being on
| call when the production line goes down? There are thousands of
| technician jobs that are more 2 year associate degree types
| needed as well.
|
| I've also seen stories that because of the small number of fabs
| it is difficult to switch jobs because there are not many
| options. This pushes down salaries as well. In contrast to design
| where there are hundreds of companies which you can leave and go
| to and get significant salary increases.
|
| As with most jobs, more pay and better working conditions will
| attract more people.
| bombcar wrote:
| Perhaps the government needs to step in and declare certain
| "important national security jobs" except from taxation or
| something.
|
| Probably would just drop the salaries to minimum wage :(
| thebigwinning wrote:
| > do young people want to work in manufacturing plants being on
| call when the production line goes down
|
| They do if the jobs pay enough to live. There are a lot more
| classes of young people than recent grads from big
| universities. See Amazon warehouse and airports.
| alephnerd wrote:
| I'm one of those young people.
|
| If I attended Oregon State, why would I want to earn $70k
| base with almost no stock and bonus to work at Intel or
| Micron as a New College Grad Process Engineer in Beaverton or
| Boise where I have income tax when I can make $110-140k base
| with a 10% bonus and stock at Amazon, Google, or Microsoft in
| Seattle (let alone smaller startups or non-name brand
| companies like UIPath) while paying no income tax.
|
| The classes you study in EE/CE are extremely similar (and
| often the same) to those in CS so I may as well earn more
| with a better quality of life.
|
| Salaries in the Semiconductor industry in the United States
| are stuck at 2000s levels, which lead to the massive
| outsourcing of electronics talent to Taiwan, South Korea,
| PRC, Israel, India, and Malaysia because you could pay
| $50-70k salaries and still get top of the barrel talent in
| the EE space (though Israel is seeing the same shift to
| software - sad days for Haifa).
| thebigwinning wrote:
| > If I attended Oregon state
|
| Then you aren't one of those people. I thought this was
| about technician level with high school and associates
| degrees
|
| Also people make career choices for reasons other than
| money. For example, interest and geographic location.
| ilyt wrote:
| "Technican level" in steel factory is not same as
| semiconductor factory. You need to understand process to
| control and fix it and semiconductor manufacturing is
| probably _the_ most complex process out of anything
| humanity makes in factory.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Then you aren't one of those people.
|
| I almost was.
|
| > I thought this was about technician level with high
| school and associates degrees
|
| The article is about students attending Bachelors and
| Masters programs. Even process and manufacturing roles
| require a 4 year degree now. I have friends who are
| specifically working these jobs at the Intel fab in
| Beaverton (hence my call out of it)
|
| For example
|
| LTD Manufacturing Equipment Technician - Intel
| (Hillsboro, OR)
|
| Associate's degree or Bachelor's degree in a Mechanical
| or Electrical STEM field related to semiconductor
| manufacturing technology * Examples: Microelectronics,
| Mechatronics, Electronic Technology, Equipment
| Technology, Industrial Technology, Manufacturing
| Technology, Avionics Technology, Electrical, Chemical,
| Materials OR Semiconductor related Scientific STEM Degree
|
| > people make career choices for reasons other than money
|
| Not if you have college loans to pay off.
| thebigwinning wrote:
| > Not if you have college loans to pay off.
|
| The evidence that people are taking the exact jobs you
| say nobody will take disagrees.
| alephnerd wrote:
| I've posted the job req qualifications for an open
| techncian role at Intel above. Take a look at it.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| So, it's been a while since I worked in semiconductor
| manufacturing, but I know a little bit about this from personal
| experience. The community colleges, yes maybe; the universities,
| no not particularly.
|
| Once upon a time every fab needed lots of engineers, because they
| were designing the manufacturing process (because each company
| had only one fab, or at least only one modern one). As they grew,
| they kept hiring engineers for each fab, mostly out of habit and
| custom. Then they put huge bureaucratic obstacles in the way of
| changing anything, because the manufacturing process was already
| designed (at another fab), and you didn't want every engineer who
| wanted to make his mark on things to screw it up.
|
| The thing is that if you make a change in step 87 out of 450, and
| that change turns out to screw things up, you can have
| (450-87)/450 = 80% of your factory is full of dud semiconductors.
| It takes a few months for a wafer to get from the beginning to
| the end of the line, so that's a couple months of production from
| your multi-billion dollar fab, that you can throw in the trash.
| So mostly, they don't want the engineers to do any design,
| because there's way more downside than upside. Only at the R&D
| fab is anything like real design done.
|
| Now, to run the (rather complex) equipment, you probably want a
| lot of community college graduates, although frankly a smart
| high-school graduate could do it well with a few days training.
| But the only reason they "require" so many engineers at
| production fabs, is that they don't realize it's not necessary.
| It's a bunch of people who worked for years to get an engineering
| degree, put in a place where they are very nearly forbidden to
| change anything.
|
| If the multi-billion dollar fab is made, they will run it. If
| there are not enough college graduates to staff it, they will
| miraculously discover that smart high school graduates will do
| just as well, as long as there are engineers at the R&D fab.
| bunnie wrote:
| It's also been a while since I stepped foot in a fab, but my
| impression is that for modern processes there are no people in
| the fab proper. It is fully automated, people sit outside the
| fab or they service machines in drop-down bays underneath the
| fab floor, accessible only through airlocks.
|
| What the technicians are there for isn't to operate the
| robots...they're supposed to analyze the performance of the
| robots constantly and summarize anomalies and flag them to the
| next shift. So a work shift might involve metrology,
| statistics, and communication skills; I wouldn't expect that
| skill set from any but the most exceptional US high school
| graduates, and those folks are bound for the university, not a
| job with 12-hour days wearing clean room suits and limited
| bathroom breaks.
|
| Some of the more fussy processes like EUV require regular
| cleaning of excess tin in the machine as well to keep yield up.
| afaik it's a trade secret as to how this process works, but I
| know one of the big delays in rolling out EUV is that the
| cleaning process was hard, and that lead to a lot of downtime
| on the line. People on both side of the Pacific were able to
| make chips with EUV for a while, but they just couldn't make
| money while making them. TSMC cracked that nut, but I haven't
| read any articles describing exactly what their magic was to
| get the uptime so high. However, I suspect it might involve a
| platoon of PhD-level experts that also work like an F1 pit
| crew.
|
| Anyways, the days of carrying boxes of wafers from machine to
| machine and pressing buttons are long gone. Everything that can
| be automated has been, what's left is debugging and servicing
| robots, and searching for early signs of degradation in an
| otherwise fully automated machine.
|
| So, the real value of a highly trained technician in this case
| is they can look at bumps in the data and go "huh..." and flag
| it to management so that you don't have 80% of the fab full of
| trash wafers. In this situation, you want someone who actually
| understand the physics of the process going on inside the
| machine, and not just someone who is following an SOP. Any
| analysis that could be easily automated probably already has
| been.
|
| Of course, you need even more highly skilled people to set up
| the robots in the first place, and that process also consumes
| hundreds if not thousands of engineers, depending on your
| schedule, scale and the complexity of the machines. A lot of
| that can be pushed back onto vendors, but you still need an on-
| site team who actually understands the physics to get your
| process yields up to several nines and hold it there with
| almost no downtime.
| kurthr wrote:
| Yes, it's mostly the continual equipment maintenance and the
| occasional process engineer that goes actually looking at the
| equipment (mostly in drop bays) as wafers go by in boxes.
| Most of those are associates degree positions, because you
| need to understand enough (cleanliness, electronics, a little
| chemistry/optics, and some chemistry) to debug and replace
| components without breaking more stuff. Most of the equipment
| is manufactured, updated, and maintained/fixed by european,
| american, and japanese FAEs anyway.
|
| That said, I do still hear that when there's an actual yield
| problem (or a delay in achieving yield), then there's a lot
| of overtime for the process engineers getting it up and
| running. Usually some engineer has to be on call all night in
| each area (photo, diff/dep, etch, implant), but in an office
| nearby.
|
| Oh, and also there is all the process model
| extraction/control that has to be done for each fab/process.
| That's a whole group of serious engineers to create the PDKs.
| BostonEnginerd wrote:
| There are still plenty of people in the fab. They're not
| usually running product around in a modern automated fab, but
| there are always equipment issues to work through. When you
| have fleets of multiple tens of tools, it's always an
| exercise to keep them matched and in-line with each other.
| The majority of modern cleanrooms are "ballroom" style, where
| the tools all sit out in the open. Each tool has a class 1
| mini-environment inside which keeps the product clean.
| Outside the tools is a cleanroom, but it's not as clean as
| inside.
|
| Remote access has helped out a lot, but the process
| engineering folks will still spend a bunch of time every week
| on the line. The equipment engineering folks will spend time
| every day on the line working on things.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| True that, but if they didn't have enough engineering
| graduates, they wouldn't just not run the fab. They would
| suddenly discover that a few engineers at the R&D fab, plus
| some motivated and smart high school graduates at the
| production fab, can totally make things run. The fabs will
| not sit idle due to a lack of college graduates.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Everything I hear about semiconductor technology sounds like you
| need two PhDs minimum and then you have to work in horrible
| environments with horrible management (either personally or just
| due to stressful deadlines).
|
| Like this kind of comment seems par for the course (though not
| the PhD bit, that's more for the "science" end of things):
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/kdzs4t/any_ad...
| HPsquared wrote:
| I think prestige is a big factor (and kind of a trap): people
| want to work in a prestigious field regardless of lower salary,
| worse working conditions etc. That's why there is so much
| competition. Kind of like how academic positions are so
| competitive despite low pay.
|
| EDIT: Also an oversupply of graduates who feel they need to
| work in their fields of study. Actually I think "graduate
| oversupply" is the main issue. Feels like such a waste to work
| elsewhere if you've dedicated years to studying something, it's
| a major sunk cost.
| ghaff wrote:
| Maybe it's less common today, but I would say the
| overwhelming majority of people I went to undergrad with
| ended up doing things that were only tangentially related (or
| not related at all) to what their degree was in.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Yep, 50% of graduates from my course went into finance,
| after spending 4 years learning about electrons. Joke's on
| me, they probably started at more than what I make now.
| thebigwinning wrote:
| It sounds like you went to an ivy league?
| alephnerd wrote:
| Not OP but not necessarily. I have a similar percentage
| of Physics+Applied Math major friends who attended Cal
| and UCLA who ended up in Consulting and/or Financial
| Engineering.
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of the sciences aren't really terminal degrees for
| people who want to actually pursue the subject of their
| major as a profession explicitly. So if you don't want to
| go on and get a physics PhD--which may not be a great
| career trajectory anyway--going into something that
| interests you and pays generally smart people who aren't
| scared of numbers well isn't the worst place to go. (And
| you're probably actually better off with that physics
| degree than you would have been with an undergrad
| business degree.)
| alephnerd wrote:
| Agreed!
|
| I am one of those disaffected STEM grads btw - T10 STEM
| program grad -> Engineering internships -> Policy Stint
| -> BSchool -> MBB -> Product Management
|
| The business portion is easy to teach, and hiring for
| Finance+IB+VC+Consulting+PM roles is increasingly
| oriented only at STEM grads and BSchool grads from top
| programs (eg. BSBAs @ Haas, Wharton, Anderson, Ross,
| Stern)
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm pretty similar--engineering undergrad/masters ->
| worked as an engineer in oil business for a few years ->
| MBA -> product management -> various analyst/marketing
| roles that followed from that fairly naturally.
|
| To add to that, given when I went to school and the fact
| that I wasn't a CS major, I didn't touch a computer in
| undergrad. (Not literally true--I took a FORTRAN course
| which I didn't use until much later.) Never touched a PC
| until I was working and that was initially an Apple II we
| ran a couple of analysis programs on. But... like many of
| my classmates we ended up in the computer industry
| anyway.
|
| >increasingly oriented only at STEM grads and BSchool
| grads from top programs
|
| I assume the idea is that they have not only already been
| filtered by the schools, but they're presumably not
| dummies if they got the program with flying colors, we
| can do a sanity check that we can put them in front of
| clients, and teach them what they need to know.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > engineer in oil business
|
| Oh whoa! That industry definetly played (and still does)
| a big part in technology today. I heard a lot of stories
| about the HPC/Simulations and Networking research done by
| the ONG sector.
|
| > we can do a sanity check that we can put them in front
| of clients, and teach them what they need to know
|
| Exactly! That's how I do hiring for interns and new grad
| PMs as well! Also the added benefit of having technically
| adept candidates makes imparting domain specific
| knowledge easier (if I'm a Cybersecurity PM, I'd like to
| have someone with networking+os chops along with business
| sense)
| ghaff wrote:
| I was actually an engineer for an offshore drilling
| contractor. More planning and running shipyard jobs than
| doing HPC stuff though I was also involved in a couple
| accident investigations.
|
| But got in at a hot time and had a planned departure to
| grad school just as things were having a major downturn.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Yea that makes sense! Would love to hear stories about
| that!
| thebigwinning wrote:
| That makes sense.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| No, but it was a decent enough British one. Still seems
| wasteful of everyone's time to hammer in MOSFET equations
| to someone who has subzero interest in electronics
| ("doesn't recognise a screwdriver in practicals and no
| intention to start now; it's not in the exam" level of
| apathy). But then again they all got Firsts by absolutely
| smashing exams and I didn't. So, I have to say they could
| really focus on something they didn't care a jot about,
| for years, as a means to an end (landing a job at
| Deloitte, in the case of the screwdriver person) in a way
| that I never could.
|
| If you just wanted to learn differential equations or
| something there must be way more effective ways to do
| that, and it would free the engineering teachers to teach
| engineering to aspiring engineers, who are being turned
| away in droves to make space for City-fuel grads.
|
| However, as they say, _the market has spoken_ ,
| especially in a country where "industrial policy" is
| either "lol" or "sell".
| alephnerd wrote:
| The UK job market is a bit different from the US tbh. It
| feels like there isn't enough respect for
| Engineering+STEM in the UK. Almost everyone from good
| programs seems to end up in S&T or Consulting or IB.
| [deleted]
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| This is the most believable explanation.
|
| There's probably less than 500 people in the entire world
| that are making actual design decisions for the most advanced
| nodes.
|
| So the status benefits would be higher then practically
| anyone in SV outside the C-suite and a few well known
| personalities.
| dumpster_fire wrote:
| I majored in semiconductors out of genuine interest. It was
| fascinating to me how miniature components can be turned into
| digital and analog devices. It turned out to be one of the most
| boring things I've ever touched. Cadence was an endless loop of
| crashing and losing progress. Anything you designed was called
| worthless because there's already a library of capacitors,
| amplifiers and DAC ADC components for you to drag and drop in. It
| was so incredibly dry.
|
| During our final semester in school, or professor walked in and
| said, "All of you but X needs to know that you're going to be
| unemployed." He said that to a class of 4 people, the only ones
| left after most of the original class of 20+ had quit.
|
| "The industry only hires the exceptional, you are all inept.
| Except for X, my favorite student."
|
| X ended up being the only person to go on to work in a semicon
| company. The rest of us ended up in software, earning 5x the pay
| X was making. The barrier of entry to software engineering is so
| so much lower than semicon, which still makes no sense to me.
| ilyt wrote:
| > The barrier of entry to software engineering is so so much
| lower than semicon, which still makes no sense to me.
|
| Why ? So much software is far less complex to design than
| semiconductor stuff
| andersa wrote:
| The confusing part is that working on the simple software
| will likely get you a much higher salary.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| And the industry is so brutally cyclical. They'll hire
| thousands, work them into the ground to get some machine or
| line done, then let them all go, then hire them all in a flurry
| next time they need to build something. It's also very toxic in
| my experience, lots of mean people.
| chongli wrote:
| The way that toxic prof treated the class makes no sense, but
| the barrier to entry in industry makes a lot of sense, even if
| we don't like it. Semiconductor is just insanely capital-
| intensive. Now that it's become a major issue of strategic
| concern for the USG there is finally some capital available for
| it.
|
| People have finally begun to realize that if all you do is
| build software, you're completely dependent on your hardware
| suppliers. It's like being a commuter society that doesn't make
| their own cars.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Then _pay up_. If the industry is so important and a ruined
| batch costs $30M, it 's a disgrace if you can't pay the
| people six digits.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| They do, for the 1 in a thousand engineer. For example the
| vast majority of TSMC engineers aren't making that much,
| but a select few easily earn 10x FAANG compensation.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Here's what I learned working at Samsung:
|
| At the end of the day, the stakes are way too high to allow
| everyone a chance to play cowboy with the tools. You want your
| best possible champions to bring a design to bear. Then, the
| other 99% of the army is responsible for implementing the
| design in as repeatable & standardized a fashion as physically
| possible so that there is even the remotest chance of
| yield+profit. Software is the antithesis of this. The cost of
| playing around with your tools is not even worth accounting
| for. Due to certain cultural effects, you probably _don 't_
| want to do software in semiconductor industry unless you
| really, really like the problem domain.
|
| Even if you don't get to play around with the billion dollar
| tools, you still get to help troubleshoot some of the most
| intensely complicated problems on earth. Solving these riddles
| is very rewarding and the experience will stick with you
| forever. Hard to package those 2 sentences up into a PR
| campaign for the young generation, but I'm sure we can spin it
| if the DoD can still find ways to recruit.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> Solving these riddles is very rewarding and the experience
| will stick with you forever._
|
| That was also my experience working in the semi field (in
| Europe). People working there weren't in it for obscene
| compensation, they were into it for the hands on puzzle
| solving of uniquely complex HW problems with cool and rare
| expensive machinery. Some were quite significantly underpaid
| and while they knew it they never felt the need to complain
| too badly about it. I guess it's kind of like arts, which is
| a shame, because here some publicly traded corporation is
| abusing you for your passion.
|
| Also, the fact that most of Europe doesn't have many FAANGs
| and big SW companies paying orders of magnitude more to un-
| balance the jobs market, surely help to not discourage people
| from this industry.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> 99% of the army is responsible for implementing the design
| in as repeatable & standardized a fashion as physically
| possible so that there is even the remotest chance of
| yield+profit.
|
| That sounds like a mature and competitive field. I am
| suspicious of companies and fields where people _aren 't_
| working like this. Look at the car industry, or energy, or
| farming, or shipping, or even aerospace. Only one of every
| thousand engineers at Boeing will ever decide the shape of an
| aircraft wing. The other 99% are there to implement and
| optimize its construction. Any company not spending 99% of
| its energies on optimization does not operate in a
| competitive environment and is therefore very likely on
| borrowed time. Eventually a competitor will appear or an IP
| monopoly expire and the easy times will be over.
| ip26 wrote:
| (Or it's a very young industry)
| wernercd wrote:
| In the grand scheme of things... in a universe that's
| billions of years old. Humanity is 200k+ years old.
| Civilization is 6k years old.
|
| Computers? 100 years old.
|
| What part of any "modern" industry isn't still very very
| young? even industries like construction that have been
| around for thousands of years are still relatively young.
|
| Computers and computing? infinitesimal.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Old by how close the industry's products are to physical
| limits.
|
| For example, the newest gas turbine designs are already
| exceeding 50% of the maximum theoretically possible
| efficiency as allowed by thermodynamics. So it doesn't
| matter how many thousands or millions more years gas
| turbines are optimized, by us, aliens, future
| descendants, etc...
|
| No future gas turbine industry in this universe can
| possibly double the thermodynamic efficiency of the
| finished product.
| samstave wrote:
| > _Old by how close the industry 's products are to
| physical limits._
|
| I was just listening to an AI podcast and they were
| duscussing going from the 1 second, 1 minutes, 1 day
| [unit of response - I cant recall the name of the
| measurement] -- but I assume thats the "moores law" of AI
| right now?
|
| And as we get closer to the physical limits of chip
| production scale/die/etc - I assume they will be scaled
| horizontally while the GPT-X capabilities will scale
| volumetric-ally.
|
| Is this a sound assumption?
| alephnerd wrote:
| Not OP, but even GPT-X and ML reaches limits due to lack
| of compute and/or datasets.
|
| For example, CNNs were largely known and discovered by
| the 1990s-2000s, but the compute simply didn't exist yet
| until GPU manufacturing became commoditized.
|
| OpenAI's massive quantum leap is thanks to the massive
| corpora they were able to leverage, which until the past
| 5 years, simply didn't exist.
|
| This is why we've seen massive jumps in Mandarin Machine
| Translation and Computer Vision from the PRC due to their
| massive corpora/dataset of English+Mandarin language news
| from CCTV/CGTN and local surveillance camera data
| respectively.
|
| This compute limit is a big reason why the US Federal
| Govt has been working on the Exascale Computing Project
| for example.
| samstave wrote:
| > _" reaches limits due to lack of compute and/or
| datasets._
|
| Yes! thats what I mean by scaling VOLUMETRICALLY --
| scaling horizontally and vertically are now replaced by
| volumetrically. (coining a term?)
|
| its going to be an obloid-worping sphere-oid
|
| Thats what I see down the pipe..?
|
| Thoughts, anyone?
| ip26 wrote:
| By "very young", I'm talking about industry that is still
| figuring out the right direction. Monoplanes made
| biplanes obsolete, no matter how perfectly the biplane's
| wing was designed. That kind of dramatic and rapid change
| tends to happen during the infancy of an industry.
|
| See the early shifts from vacuum tubes to semiconductors,
| from expertly-crafted BJT to crude CMOS, or the rapid
| march of good-enough architectures in the latest process
| node clobbering beautiful architectures in older nodes.
| As the industry has matured and course has stabilized,
| perfecting the design has grown in importance.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Hah, having worked in automotive, things are dysfunctional
| as shit. Oh, they ship things, sure, but mostly as a
| consequence of sheer will of plowring man-hours in thins
| untill they kinda work.
|
| Curious what was your experience operating in those fields.
| ilyt wrote:
| And here I was wondering how manufacturers can take a
| thing that works and make it not work in new engine
| version.
|
| Shit like "we did chain driven timing and it worked, but
| in new engine it prematurely wears", or "someone decided
| it is fine for belt-driven timing to take dip in oil, oh
| surprise, we now have parts of the belt landing in
| various parts of the engine".
|
| Or my favourite, "metal, belt driven water pump is almost
| never replaced thru the lifetime of the engine and it's
| cheap, let's make propellers plastic and also drive it
| from separate electric engine"
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Forget chains. Gear-driven cams are best. My motorcycle
| had them, but honda switched to chains in the new models
| because cam gears made a small high-pitched noise.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > Any company not spending 99% of its energies on
| optimization does not operate in a competitive environment
|
| That's how a company stagnates and eventually gets
| replaced. Yes operational efficiency and optimization is
| important, but you only do that if you have a big moat and
| not much growth ahead of you. You need to spend at least
| 30% on growth and innovation so you can stay relevant.
| Higher if you are the one trying to replace the 99% ones.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I think it's simpler than that. Semiconductor manufacturing
| is such an advanced field, and there are so few openings for
| engineers, that they can be very selective in who they hire.
| We don't need to conclude that semiconductor engineering is
| particularly difficult, it's sufficient to conclude that they
| are simply picking people who will work lots of unpaid
| overtime, simply for the thrill of working in such a cutting-
| edge field.
| throwawaybbq1 wrote:
| I'm a hobbyist in this area, and think the field is somewhat
| early in its development. MCUs and cyber-physical systems was
| like this until the Arduino happened. Arduino may not have
| been the first to do exactly that but it was just good enough
| to cause an (re?)explosion in electronics as a hobby. During
| its hayday, I would say Arduino was a core element of the
| Maker movement.
|
| So what needs to happen to make this a reality for semi-con?
| First off, we need cheap, cheap fabrication. I actually
| looked at public funding in Canada and how that was going to
| the big name Universities who had their own in-house fab labs
| (at older process nodes). The costs of someone not in the
| inside was nuts. The actual cost should be in the 100s of
| dollars to fabricate a design (considering the marginal
| costs).
|
| There are people that do this at home but it doesn't work
| either due to chemicals being pretty dangerous and the need
| for a bunch of equipment. I bet the amount of money the EU
| spent on its first metaverse townhall (or whatever it was
| called .. the thing very few people attended) or a tiny
| fraction Canada wastes on silly things promoting youth
| culture or whatever, they could fund a lab that is actually
| open to the public, with the express mission of promoting
| hobbyists and education. This will NEVER happen because (a)
| it needs a professor who is on the inside with a kid-like
| passion in this tech and a commitment to bringing it to the
| masses (I see some profs like this at schools like MIT but it
| is so rare at large, competitive schools like the big ones in
| Canada), and (b) it does not have an instant payoff for the
| govt. They don't want dabblers and vague educational
| outcomes. They want workers with degrees.
|
| I am convinced before I am dead, advances in robotics and
| fabrication will simply the process (or use home equipment
| such as future laser printers for printing stencils). I'd
| love to spend my retirement fabricating my own CPUs :D
|
| Edit:
|
| Let me add: I don't mean the cutting edge process node. I
| mean the kind of process node that was used to make the very
| first chips (but less toxic, repeatable, cheaper equipment).
| If it is possible for synthetic biology, it must be doable
| for semicon :D
| lizknope wrote:
| I'm a 25 year professional in the industry so I've never
| really thought of the hobbyist side. I use software from
| commercial Cadence and Synopsys that has a list price of
| over $1 million for a single physical design tool license
| and we use about 200 of those licenses simultaneously to
| tape out a chip. Then we spend about $30 million in mask
| costs. If we make a mistake it is another $20-30 million
| for new masks and another 4 months in the fab for a new
| chip.
|
| Google / SkyWater / eFabless have this program for 90/130nm
| chips. That is really old technology from the 2002-2006
| time range but it is still useful for a lot of types of
| chips.
|
| https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/07/SkyWater-and-
| Googl...
|
| https://www.skywatertechnology.com/technology-and-design-
| ena...
|
| https://efabless.com/open_shuttle_program
|
| I am curious what kind of hobbyist chips you want to make
| that can't be done in an FPGA? You can't do custom analog
| in an FPGA but these days you can find FPGAs with multiple
| PCIE / USB / HDMI serdes links, DAC, ADC, etc.
| blihp wrote:
| The problem with FPGA's isn't the hardware... it's quite
| complete and capable. It's the software stack you're
| forced to access most of them via that makes them a non-
| starter for many/most hobbyists. (cost is a major issue,
| but hardly the only one) My guess is that as low cost
| producers who have embraced the existing open source FPGA
| software being developed start producing higher end parts
| (more recent process nodes, large LUT count etc), that's
| when you'll really start to see them take off in the
| hobbyist world.
|
| I think the OP isn't even talking about 2006-level
| capability but rather something akin to 3D printing for
| semis that approached even early (i.e. somewhere in the
| 1960's-1980's range) level fab capability for hobbyists.
| Obviously it doesn't exist currently, but that's the
| dream for some.
| lizknope wrote:
| I get paid to do this professionally so I don't follow
| the hobbyist side but I've heard of people using this for
| FPGAs. I have no idea how it compares to commercial
| tools.
|
| https://github.com/YosysHQ/oss-cad-suite-build
|
| OSS CAD Suite is a binary software distribution for a
| number of open source software used in digital logic
| design. You will find tools for RTL synthesis, formal
| hardware verification, place & route, FPGA programming,
| and testing with support for HDLs like Verilog, Migen and
| Amaranth.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Cost of the FPGA design tools isn't really the biggest
| barrier. The big barrier is that the FPGA design tools
| from the FPGA companies are full of bugs that you spend
| an inordinate amount of time trying to work around. Some
| open source tools like Yosys have emerged. So far they're
| limited to the ICE-40 FPGAs from Lattice and a few older
| Xilinx parts. I've used them with the ICE-40 and they do
| work well. Hopefully FPGA companies will come to realize
| the value of opening up so that 3rd party tools can be
| developed for them.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| > The big barrier is that the FPGA design tools from the
| FPGA companies are full of bugs that you spend an
| inordinate amount of time trying to work around.
|
| Do they not have older, more stable, releases?
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| you cannot fathom how bad eg Xilinx's FPGA tool suite is.
| like beyond the fact it's like some kind of frankenstein
| monster because they bought up a bunch of smaller tools
| and glued them together with fucking tcl, any individual
| piece is worse than your worst open source
| compiler/ide/whatever tool you use to build software. and
| yet people say that it's 10x better than the competitors'
| offerings. hell on earth is being an FPGA dev _without a
| direct line to Xilinx employee for help debugging_ (which
| is how things really work professionally).
|
| just lend some credence to myself here - vitis, their
| supposed hls offering that turns C++ into RL by magic and
| genius and oracles, today embeds LLVM 7.0 (released in 19
| Sep 2018). gee i wonder how many perf and etc
| improvements have landed in LLVM since 7 since today LLVM
| is approach 17.
|
| i could tell you more but it would just spike my blood
| pressure after 6 months of not having to deal with that
| mess.
| jes wrote:
| I'll second this, but for Intel / Altera.
|
| I started working with a Stratix 10 GX dev kit last year,
| and the Intel Quartus Prime Pro software. It's been a
| nightmare.
|
| 1. Unless you have a direct line to an experienced
| support engineer inside Intel, technical support amounts
| to pleading with new-hire support engineers who can't do
| more than try to look something up and regurgitate it
| back to you.
|
| 2. Sample designs don't work with the tools you have. A
| design might be for version 18 of Quartus and you have
| version 23. You can try to auto-upgrade the IP, and maybe
| 3/4 of the time it works. The other 1/4 of the time it's
| some obscure error you can't track down, so you're back
| on the "Community Site" begging for help.
|
| 3. Doing something like programming your design into
| flash on the S10 board involves lots and lots of
| research, including watching Intel produced YouTube
| videos.
|
| I could go on, but the whole process is like running in
| wet cement.
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| > I could go on, but the whole process is like running in
| wet cement.
|
| just quit. seriously it's not worth it. no job you have
| (not even low-latency work in HFT) will compensate you
| enough to make investing time, blood, sweat, hair, and
| sleep into this work worth it. there is a better, more
| rewarding, with an actually transferable set of skills,
| software job waiting for you somewhere out there.
| [deleted]
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| No.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > I use software from commercial Cadence and Synopsys
| that has a list price of over $1 million for a single
| physical design tool license and we use about 200 of
| those licenses simultaneously to tape out a chip. Then we
| spend about $30 million in mask costs. If we make a
| mistake it is another $20-30 million for new masks and
| another 4 months in the fab for a new chip.
|
| I've thought for a long time now that this is an area
| ripe for disruption. But it's very difficult to disrupt -
| it hasn't been yet. EDA software is probably the easier
| part to disrupt. Some open source EDA tools are out
| there, but not so much on the physical design side.
| est31 wrote:
| There is the libresilicon project:
| https://libresilicon.com/
|
| But I don't know how usable they are.
| ilyt wrote:
| > MCUs and cyber-physical systems was like this until the
| Arduino happened
|
| I'd say it technically happened when cheap flash based
| microcontrollers become available.
|
| Before you had to have *at the very least* EPROM programmer
| and eraser (or CRT TV I guess) to even put your code onto
| microcontroller. Flash based microcontrollers meant all you
| needed is parallel port and some wires to start programming
| microcontrollers, dropping the barrier to entry by orders
| of magnitude if you already had PC to program.
|
| Then we had first wave with Basic STAMP and similar making
| it even easier.
|
| Then it was Arduino that exploded it and there were other
| factors on that too.
|
| >So what needs to happen to make this a reality for semi-
| con? First off, we need cheap, cheap fabrication. I
| actually looked at public funding in Canada and how that
| was going to the big name Universities who had their own
| in-house fab labs (at older process nodes). The costs of
| someone not in the inside was nuts. The actual cost should
| be in the 100s of dollars to fabricate a design
| (considering the marginal costs).
|
| Like that. Before making PCB was either doing it at home
| that took a bunch of time and not everyone wanted to play
| with chemicals, or expensive to prototype PCB.
|
| Now we have extremely cheap low volume PCBs and even well
| priced low volume manufacturing options. Same thing with 3D
| printing, went from massively expensive to affordable.
|
| The problem really is that it's still a bit profitable to
| do so for companies doing it, while doing same for chip-
| making would be oh so much harder unless someone put some
| SERIOUS R&D into making "industrial chip printer" where
| each wafer could have different set of chips (packaging I
| guess could be handled by requiring each submitted chip to
| have connectors in same place). So no mask but some kind of
| DLP or similar projector to do lithography (dunno if that
| even possible for anything in hundreds of nm range, just
| guessing)
| scrlk wrote:
| https://developers.google.com/silicon might be of interest
| to you.
| lizknope wrote:
| I'm in digital physical design and part of that 99% of the
| army. The schedule is king. If we make a mistake it is
| another $30 million for mask costs and 4 months in the fab to
| get a new chip to test. Contrast with software where you can
| change 1 line of code and recompile and test in seconds. We
| do so much to minimize risk by reusing existing blocks,
| licensing third party IP that has already been validated in
| silicon, and armies of verification engineers.
| bombolo wrote:
| > recompile and test in seconds
|
| i wish
| ponector wrote:
| And you don't need to compile in many cases..
| junon wrote:
| Compare that to the lead time of electronics, though. I
| just started in PCB design which is _leagues_ more time
| forgiving than silicon design and fab, and even then if a
| non-generic component I 'm designing for goes out of
| stock, the lead time for a new batch is anywhere from a
| month to a _few years_ , on average around 4-6 months.
|
| Thinking about the design process, testing and revisions,
| all the way to fab and then market, we're probably
| talking _years_ just to see a single design reach your
| test bench (I 'm speculating). Oh and millions, because
| the major chip fabs only do things in large batches.
|
| Compare this to software. It is, indeed, seconds in
| comparison.
|
| I'd love for semiconductor fabrication to get fragmented
| out like it sounds like it will.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| > I'd love for semiconductor fabrication to get
| fragmented out like it sounds like it will.
|
| Why does it matter for lead times?
|
| If 2 fabs with a lead time of X turn into 5 with a lead
| time of X... your still waiting.
| junon wrote:
| Lead time isn't because of some magical bottleneck. It's
| because of demand and batch size. If university students
| can somehow decimate the batch size needed per design,
| and enough groups do this (or find new ways to reduce the
| process size in order for more firms to do this), and
| enough of them do it at once to help demand, then the
| lead time goes down, and so do costs.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Do you understand what lead times are?
|
| For example, 9 women can't have a baby in 1 month,
| because there is a series of necessary processes that has
| to be undergone and can't be accelerated.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You seem to not get the GP's point at all. The bottleneck
| in the lead time of semiconductors is not physics at all.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Those are called supply chain shortages.
|
| I'm fairly certain the actual lead times to procure semi-
| custom chips are indeed 1 month+. And a fully custom chip
| is 1 year+.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Yeah but that speed also means we can go from idea to broad
| release quickly which both means quicker to market to
| deliver value but can also mean that a screw up scales
| quickly too.
| ianai wrote:
| How many years ago was your experience?
|
| There's definitely an increase in interest and demand for
| semis. Your experience might be very different from graduates
| looking today and in the future as demand increases.
|
| Having said that, the vitriol and toxicity in colleges and
| towards one another needs to cease. I see that being more
| naturally achieved in an economy that is growing and seeing
| things getting cheaper generally. That would look like vast
| investments in small, big, and mega projects. Imagine how much
| different the US today would be had it never built a highway
| system and stayed to only where the trains/horses went. I think
| it's 80-90%+ of US GDP transports via truck over a highway at
| some point.
| grepLeigh wrote:
| Came here just to say your professor's attitude is
| infuriatingly toxic, sorry you had to go through that.
|
| I'm curious if your experience of crashing/losing progress is
| still the norm. Do we have better CAD programs and PCB
| simulators now?
|
| My partner is an EE but I just learned how electricity works
| (beyond a middle school level) a few years ago.
| oscillonoscope wrote:
| A lot of the simulation software for PCB design is stuck in
| the 90s. The core of the simulation hasn't changed so it's
| not too big of a deal from a results perspective. However, it
| integrates terribly into the workflow so designers only
| simulate a small portion of a design and there's little
| automatic checks and things.
| mumblingdrunk wrote:
| This is just true for a whole lot of the industry tooling.
| Xilinx Vivado is a bloated piece of crap that'll crash all
| the time unless you have half a terabyte of RAM. Same goes
| for lots of other EE-tooling in general. The L and B in
| MATLAB stand for Legacy and Bloat. People still write
| programs for PLCs in Ladder, where programs still cannot be
| portable between vendors, or even different products from
| the same vendor.
|
| All the companies that produce anything invent their own
| language for the thing and write their own compiler for it.
| These compilers are clearly not written by compiler
| experts.
|
| I don't blame EEs for building bad software. They weren't
| trained to do it and aren't paid to do it. I blame the "if
| it works, it works" culture that the industry seems to
| have. Never go back to refine anything, just keep pushing
| more plugins, more software; create a patchwork of programs
| until you get the job done.
| sentinalien wrote:
| It isn't EEs building the likes of Vivado, they hire
| software engineers to do that stuff
| oscillonoscope wrote:
| Having lived on both sides of the fence, I feel
| comfortable blaming the EEs. Many are allergic to basic
| scripting, don't bother to learn how their tools work,
| and have an elitist attitude towards other design
| responsibilities (ex. layout, verification).
|
| P.S Set up Vivado in scripted mode with either an in-
| memory project or non-project mode. It works like a
| champ.
| mumblingdrunk wrote:
| > Many are allergic to basic scripting, don't bother to
| learn how their tools work, and have an elitist attitude
| towards other design responsibilities (ex. layout,
| verification).
|
| In my very limited experience, most people don't learn
| new stuff until they're forced to; either by their
| employer, by their university, or by needing to learn it
| for something they want to accomplish. This is why you'll
| have self-taught developers go for years using strings as
| enums, linear-searching in huge sorted arrays, because
| _it works_ and why would you seek out something else? I
| think the solution is to introduce more software
| development in EE education; forcibly expose them to it.
| My EE bachelor 's degree contained a whopping ONE class
| that was focused entirely on Python programming. The rest
| just used cobbled-together C code for microcontrollers,
| or arcane languages with dumb IDEs for PLCs.
|
| I'll take your hint on Vivado, thanks!
| pjc50 wrote:
| There are basically only two firms which produce chip CAD
| software, and they get to be a conservative duopoly of
| "enterprise grade" (i.e. user hostile) software.
| throwaway2990 wrote:
| In Taiwan working in semicon will earn you more than software
| engineering. It's insane that majority of software jobs in
| Taiwan earn less than monthly rent costs.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Why don't they work remotely or outsource to the West?
| uoaei wrote:
| I worked in process monitoring and supply chain departments at
| a couple semiconductor companies.
|
| There's an impenetrable culture of "best practices" that keeps
| the tech from catching up with the times. I eventually left
| because my career stagnated being on teams who couldn't update
| any of the internal tools because of this or that exec who was
| too scared to explore beyond the tiny niche they carved for
| themselves the past 10-30 years.
|
| The last team I was on was using JDK 8 and Postgres 8. Vendor
| lock-in on downstream dependents, I guess. We finally managed
| to convince leadership after 3 years that if they wanted any ML
| in their systems at all they'd need to update their stack or
| make room in their fabs for a Python server on the intranet at
| the very least. So they gave us a Windows box with 2 cores and
| 1GB of memory because "that's all that will fit" and "we aren't
| a security company".
| weinzierl wrote:
| I had a similar experience in Germany. Studied Engineering
| Physics with a major in semiconductor technology. At university
| we learned everything from high level programming, VHDL,
| electronics down to semiconductor chemistry. I didn't find it
| boring at all.
|
| Judging from our industry partnerships the semiconductor
| industry seemed to do well at the time. At least that was my
| impression. When I graduated in 2001 the signs of impeding
| death were already there however, so I worked in aerospace for
| a couple of years, went back to university for a computer
| science degree and ended up in software anyways. Not the worst
| thing to happen for me personally, but honestly I still don't
| really understand how a promising industry could die like that.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> in 2001 the signs of impeding death were already there_
|
| What were those signs?
| weinzierl wrote:
| For me specifically Siemens divesting or spinning-off its
| semiconductor assets. Before that my study program was
| almost a free ticket into Siemens. Working for Infineon,
| EPCOS or (a little later) Qimonda did not seem attractive
| to me, specifically because it was well known at the time
| that these divisions were spun-off because Siemens wanted
| to reduce the risk from the quote "highly volatile
| semiconductor business" for the parent company.
| ilyt wrote:
| MBAs, investors, and stock market ruining stuff again...
| thebigwinning wrote:
| > Anything you designed was called worthless because there's
| already a library
|
| This attitude (also in software) indicates to me someone who
| isn't very interested in a subject academically. There is so
| much to learn from prior solved problems and reinventing the
| wheel yourself.
| dumpster_fire wrote:
| Are you my prof?
|
| If we weren't interested, we would have quit during the first
| semester.
|
| Our very first assignment was to design a modified Miller.
| After nights of struggling with the software and connecting
| transistors, we were then told psyche! You could've imported
| from the library that we've never told you about! The rest of
| the assignments were essentially just importing circuits and
| moving stuff around and hitting the simulator run. Over and
| over and over again. It takes a certain grit to stare at the
| Cadence UI for 10 hours running the simulator button to yield
| a random result. There's no Stack Overflow, the TA was of no
| help. Just learning the software alone was hell. The
| instructions were on printed paper that didn't work half the
| time. Then you have the crashes that wipe out hours of work.
| We didn't dare to save our work sometimes because it'd crash
| the software. Loading the software took forever. I genuinely
| hated Cadence with a passion.
|
| I'll admit I don't have that grit. My best memory from the
| course was still being able to design and fabricate my own
| chip and PCB to go with it, and successfully converting an
| analog signal to digital and back. The ENOB took longer than
| needed to solve and it was rewarding. But I'm not doing that
| as a career.
|
| Only 3 out of the original 20+ people graduated. Only one
| bothered to apply to semicon. The barrier of entry is high,
| but the educators were of abysmal quality.
| thebigwinning wrote:
| I'm not endorsing bad professor games (which are real). But
| from my time in academia a lot of students have similar
| experiences about courses that just aren't for them.
|
| For example, in a state school analysis course, almost half
| the class decides they just need to squeeze by to graduate
| and maybe 5 students will enjoy it and do graduate school.
| dumpster_fire wrote:
| Fair point.
|
| Then again it's difficult to figure out what you are
| interested in in university at 18/19yo. Maybe just a
| vague curiosity, maybe the paycheck. But you have to
| actually take the course to know. I wish there's a better
| way.
| analognoise wrote:
| Almost exactly my experience, plus all the other bad experience
| mentioned in this thread.
|
| I wish I could have seen this when I was in school.
| CrampusDestrus wrote:
| How does it not make sense? As a software person you are
| completely relying on the hardware to do its job. You are
| putting your blind faith into the work of semiconductor
| engineers in order for you to get your paycheck
| austhrow743 wrote:
| You could write the same thing about the concrete slab the
| office or data centre is on. The barrier to being a concreter
| is very close to "applied for a job as a concreter".
| CrampusDestrus wrote:
| Yes, and civil engineers have to follow a lot of
| regulations and have to plan things carefully
| pjc50 wrote:
| More often in startup land, you are relying on the
| _investors_ for your paycheck.
|
| The place where the value is is not at all related to where
| the difficulties are or the bottlenecks are. The universe
| does not have that kind of sense of distributive justice.
| dumpster_fire wrote:
| It makes no sense because if the semiconductor industry only
| hires the absolute best student of the cohort, that's a way
| higher barrier of entry than software where 90% of the
| students in my coding class is now working in MANGA. That
| should guarantee an insanely high pay for the semiconductor
| engineer. Instead he's currently making less than what fresh
| grad MANGA hires are paid.
| plonk wrote:
| But you said they hired 1 person out of a class of 20?
| Obviously the few who get in can't ask for a high salary
| with that many candidates per position.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _But you said they hired 1 person out of a class of 20?
| Obviously the few who get in can 't ask for a high salary
| with that many candidates per position._
|
| Obviosly they can, assuming that these companies hire
| "only the best". That means that in the demand/supply
| calculations, the demand is not for "graduates of
| semiconducting programs" but "only top top graduates of
| semiconducating programs, ignore the rest".
|
| That's in much shorter supply, and means that 95% of the
| "class of 20" aren't even considered worthy as
| candidates, and aren't competition for those top semicon
| jobs. They'll need to find work in another field (like
| switching to software), or low level semicon jobs.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| bncmark wrote:
| It does not make sense because software _could_ be written
| using the same quality standards that CPUs use, which would
| involve a lot of formal reasoning and proofs.
|
| This work style, however, is not valued at all and is
| actively suppressed by "flat", non-expert hierarchies that
| reward people for being popular and sloppy.
|
| It works for web companies because errors have no
| consequences for them and the web has turned into a gigantic
| tabloid anyway.
| thebigwinning wrote:
| I think you also overestimate the formality in CPU design.
| Yes they do a lot of testing, but it's not lik an airtight
| mathematical document for the whole chip.
| mumblingdrunk wrote:
| This reminds me of an article I read a while ago
| https://alastairreid.github.io/mrs-at-scale/
|
| MRSs would enable much more of the formal verification
| parts to be generated.
| CrampusDestrus wrote:
| Abstraction layers become simpler, more rigid and more
| robust as you peel them.
|
| A painter uses rules of thumb all of the time, yet his work
| is entirely dependent on chemical engineers getting their
| science and formulas right. Artistic painting is just one
| of many uses of paint (and probably its most approximate),
| but both the painter and the industrial product engineer
| need the same quality assurances regarding their colors.
|
| Hardware needs to be solid to allow all kinds of software
| the freedom to be built.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| In my experience what trade-off is the correct one depends
| on your ability to iterate and where your risk comes from.
| Can you ship infrequently, but you know with high
| confidence what product/market-fit looks like (extreme
| example Mars mission)? In that case you want all the
| planning and verification you can get. Can you ship often,
| but have little confidence in what your users/customers
| want and what will grow your business (extreme example
| social media app)? In this case you probably want to
| prioritize speed of iteration and rework technical aspects
| once you know it's what's needed.
|
| I've had a very angry product manager because a feature
| took almost a second to load. I told him that we could make
| it load much faster but it would be almost a week of work
| and he should validate the feature with customers before we
| invest in that. "Of course we need this feature! It's core
| to the product!". So we spent a week. It worked realty
| nicely and scaled pretty well. In the next 12 months the
| feature changed completely twice because customers didn't
| find it useful. Then it was removed entirely and then we
| had to bring it back because the sales team liked it for
| demos. All that iteration was required to find what the
| market needed, not fit technical reasons, except for the
| performance work which was entirely wasted because it all
| got redone after the first user feedback.
| spacemadness wrote:
| Somewhat related but anecdotal--there was so much analog
| gatekeeping during my EE degree it really turned me off of
| analog electronics design. Some professors acted like nobody
| was worthy and delighted in ridiculous trick problems on tests
| to weed everyone out. Many also had the favorite student
| syndrome that you mentioned where everyone but X was an
| imposter. The industry also seemed to not want anyone in analog
| and semi manufacturing anyway or had very high entry
| requirements, although kept complaining about a lack of
| candidates publicly. I bet it's somewhat different today with
| the resurgence of modular synths and hobby electronics, but I
| can only imagine that it might make some professors double down
| on the hazing mentality. All that is to say, in some areas STEM
| educators have serious cultural issues to work out before just
| blasting away with funding expecting results.
| dumpster_fire wrote:
| > The industry also seemed to not want anyone in analog and
| semi manufacturing anyway or had very high entry
| requirements, although kept complaining about a lack of
| candidates publicly.
|
| Didn't take EE in the US, but your statement here seems to be
| universal. Especially true about Analog professors being
| gatekeeping jerks.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| Completely the opposite here (not in the US either), my
| analog professors were some of the most passionate and
| caring professors I had.
|
| Didn't end going in to analog design because although I
| think it's interesting I don't think it's actually fun to
| do the design. I feel like digital design has much more
| variety.
| analognoise wrote:
| This thread is so cathartic for me.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| The funny part is EE professors (analog or digital) don't
| even teach you any of the areas where analog is practical
| to digital electronics. They'll have you doing tons of
| abstract differential equations and studying transistor
| characteristics, and then kick you out into the world
| unprepared for the things you should know. Which is why
| Johnson & Graham should be the first book on the shelf of
| any new digital EE grad.
| ttymck wrote:
| Is this in the US? I suspect (am hopefully) there may be a
| different culture elsewhere.
| spacemadness wrote:
| Yes, the US which is what this article is focusing on.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, to be fair, if there is not a place at all for the
| people, those professors do in fact help their students.
|
| They got that mentality from some kind of trauma themselves.
| I'm not sure it's even the wrong adaptation, since it's not
| in their power to fix the systematic issue.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I worked on a campus with alot of semiconductor investment and
| education for a somewhat affiliated entity.
|
| The thing I noticed was that the crunch work was brutal,
| parking lots were full till 11pm half the year. The parking lot
| told the story - the execs had Teslas and BMWs in their gated
| lot. The troops were in 7-10 year old Hyundais and couldn't
| afford to buy lunch in the cafe.
|
| If you want to be in the semiconductor industry, the real
| winners are the tradesmen. They were all driving $70k pickups.
| Pipe fitters, electricians, operating engineers, etc make
| _bank_. If you know how to build the supporting infrastructure
| around some ASML tool, your income is limited by your desire to
| work. I can think of a dozen serious contracting companies in
| those lines of work that spun out of building that place.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Unfortunately, this is how Soviet engineering was operating
| until it all tanked. Engineers with university degrees
| getting paid peanuts as an official policy.
|
| It's sad seeing this practice repeated. And people falling
| for that.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Official policy sounds like the Soviet Union was the only
| employer and they were deciding to pay peanuts
| unilaterally.
|
| Is this the case with modern hardware engineers? No one is
| forcing them to accept low pay, or learn how to write
| software and earn more.
|
| Sounds like they are getting paid market price, and it has
| been decades since it is known that pay for hardware
| engineers is low, indicating that people should stay away
| unless they want relatively low pay.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| There's no compulsion, but people tend to nerd out in the
| specialty and lose their way. It's hard to be the
| respected engineer in <pick a topic> and start over as a
| newb. Many of the folks in these fields get caught in a
| visa trap as well that makes the friction that much
| stronger.
|
| One of my classmates in high school was a well regarded
| engineer that specialized in some sort of critical
| manufacturing process. Published papers, had patents,
| etc. Unfortunately, a new tech replaced that process, and
| he found himself laid off and kinda screwed.
|
| He had a good network, crammed for a PMP and got into the
| project management racket and went back to school. Now he
| does cyber analysis stuff.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| No the tradesmen were traditionally making bank (well the
| skilled ones) because "power of the proletariat".
| badpun wrote:
| > Official policy sounds like the Soviet Union was the
| only employer and they were deciding to pay peanuts
| unilaterally.
|
| The official doctrine was that it was a Laborer's
| Republic, and so physical labor very often paid more than
| mental one. It was all about making the common man feel
| as if the state is really organized for the benefit of
| people like him, and not some narrow elites. Of course,
| it was BS.
| ttymck wrote:
| Is in the US?
| lizknope wrote:
| What kind of job is X doing and at what company?
|
| Are they working at a fab? Working in the manufacturing portion
| of the fab? Doing process design work on a computer? There are
| so many different types of jobs within the semiconductor
| industry and some are going to pay far higher than others.
|
| As I said in my other comment in the thread I have worked at
| many fabless semiconductor companies. The different between
| software and hardware salaries at companies like Nvidia and
| Apple is around 10% or so, not 5X.
| dumpster_fire wrote:
| Last I heard it was Micron. Not too sure what X got into. He
| was definitely a genius though.
|
| [Edit] Just checked. He has left the industry a few years
| back, and is now a software engineering manager. Even the
| brightest student has given up. Someone on this post said it
| best, they need to have salaries matching the amount of skill
| required.
| lizknope wrote:
| If X works in something low level like device physics then
| there are a limited number of companies doing cutting edge
| fab stuff like that. Intel, TSMC, Samsung. The small number
| of companies limits your salary potential.
|
| It's the same with being a maintenance technician for a
| piece of ASML 3nm semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
| You may be highly skilled but if there are only 3 companies
| in the world that will hire you then your salary potential
| is limited.
|
| I know about 30 people developing hardware at Apple
| (writing Verilog, custom analog serdes design) and you can
| see that their software and hardware salaries are similar.
| In some cases hardware is higher although I suspect that is
| because of the limited sample size of salary data at the
| ICT6 level.
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/software-
| eng...
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/hardware-
| eng...
|
| There is more to life than money but people who care about
| money need to look into the companies and salaries before
| they commit themselves to 4 to 10 years of college.
| dumpster_fire wrote:
| Yeah you're right. It probably really comes down to a
| lack of potential employers. Hopefully this push by the
| US can change that.
| ghaff wrote:
| Other branches of engineering: mechanical engineering,
| material science, chemical engineering, certainly civil
| engineering tend to pay at a lower level overall as well.
| And the purer sciences often require advanced degrees to
| get "real" jobs at all.
|
| When I worked for a computer systems company after
| school, my impression was that the various types of
| engineers at the company were on fairly similar pay
| scales. What I think you've seen the past couple of
| decades is that out-sized salaries at some mostly
| software-related West Coast companies have really driven
| up compensation for specific types of jobs. It seems more
| likely that will settle down to levels with comparable
| jobs over time than the other way around as a lot of
| people who are late to the game try to jump in.
| ip26 wrote:
| That's an interesting angle I'd never considered. If the
| government simply creates a lot of potential employers
| via funding, the labor market becomes competitive, which
| improves working conditions, compensation, and ultimately
| attracts talent that would not have otherwise considered
| the industry. The most interesting part is that outcome
| is almost a certainty if the government focuses on
| creating that competitive labor market through their
| investments; it doesn't require moonshots, breakthroughs,
| or wild successes to work, yet it can _produce_ them, and
| can become self-sustaining.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > If X works in something low level like device physics
| then there are a limited number of companies doing
| cutting edge fab stuff like that. Intel, TSMC, Samsung.
| The small number of companies limits your salary
| potential.
|
| You should be very careful about comparing raw salary
| numbers: a much better metric to compare is "'salary'
| minus 'cost of living at the job location'".
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| If you're pulling in 400k USD per year, it actually
| doesn't matter what the cost of living is. You tie up 40%
| of your income in a 1-2 million dollar house and still
| save $50-$100k a year while buying everything you want on
| a daily basis, then retire after 20 years and live like a
| king
| [deleted]
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I think maybe in Taiwan and China semiconductor engineers
| are earning a good salary, especially China when government
| is dumping insane amount of $$ into it. But there is a lot
| of hype though.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Software salaries in both places are also a lot lower.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Yeah but for companies as Ali and Tencent you can have
| lucrative salaries.
| marianatom wrote:
| If you end up working for Chinese companies for
| semiconductor activities (or other sensitive areas),
| you'll probably get blacklisted by western companies and
| never be able to work in the west again, which has way
| higher salaries. They'll think you are trying to steal
| sensitive tech, like the recent theft from Chinese
| employees against Apple and ASML.
|
| Also, with the US tech sanctions getting tighter and
| tighter around China, tons of failures are occurring.
| Oppo just shut down their chip design unit. Alibaba has
| had 20,000 layoffs. Massive semiconductor scams in China
| have recently brought into light, such as china's
| champion HSMC. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/36Kr-
| KrASIA/Semiconductor-f.... China has basically had no
| luck in semiconductor progress, while it's economy is
| collapsing.
|
| And really, at this point, you would be willingly working
| for a dictatorship that seeks to destroy the democratic
| countries and enslave its own Chinese citizens. Very few
| immoral engineers would sign up for that.
| hammock wrote:
| That's an hilarious story because the asshole professor ends up
| being right, a naive optimist (the supposed reader) gets a dark
| surprise, and all students involved get reasonably happy
| endings.
|
| Could be a Hollywood movie, if you fill in the gap between the
| penultimate and ultimate paragraphs with some interesting
| action
| hutzlibu wrote:
| The professor told them after they already invested years,
| they will end up unemployed. They did not, because their
| skillset was valuable somewhere else.
| hammock wrote:
| Unemployed as a semicon guy. I doubt the professor meant
| they wouldn't get a job as a fry cook
| hutzlibu wrote:
| The way op told the story, the professor meant what he
| said to humiliate the students (despite he likely knew,
| they would be wanted in other professions). And a fry
| cook is not quite comparable to a software engineer.
| bombcar wrote:
| Reminds me of talking to brewers and winemakers. The brewers
| said they could experiment as much as they want because the
| worst case was you get some different beer.
|
| The winemakers had to follow things exceptionally carefully
| because you basically couldn't improve anything, but you had
| innumerable ways to destroy the wine and end up with vinegar.
| hardware2win wrote:
| Just gimme visa and i'll take those fancy jobs :>
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| Let's not count our chickens before they hatch. I have serious
| doubts that US universities are capable of building anything
| except nepotism networks for upper-class Americans. I hope they
| prove me wrong, but you can't build a semiconductor industry on
| nepotism.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| America is home to Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Micron,
| Broadcom, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, Apple, Applied
| Materials, Lam Research, KLA, Cymer, and most of the other most
| important fabless houses and IDMs outside of Korea. TSMC and
| Samsung are both building large foundry fabs in the US. Why
| don't you stick with opining in what you know.
| NeverFade wrote:
| Not to mention, Silicon Valley is called that because the
| first major chip companies all resided there.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| US tech moved up the chain just like most US businesses
| during globalization. Why have a extremely intricate and
| expensive to run fab when you can just have a warehouse
| full of coders making better profits
| Congeec wrote:
| Fairychild, which incubated many of these semiconductor
| companies above
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Yeah but do these semiconductor students understand anything
| about the post-structalist analysis of the capitalist hegemony of
| their labor?
| sylware wrote:
| Going to be tough for them: jobs are in EU (ASML) and Taiwan
| (TSMC). Heard some other critical tool are from Japanese
| companies (masks and others).
|
| The silicium industry is critical for any modern society and it
| seems it has no economic meaning if not at worldwide scale: then
| it requires significant out-of-free-market financing. The state
| administration has to organise and maintain this "out-of-free-
| market" financing.
|
| Only bleeding-edge performant silicium must be tolerated there.
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