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Ask HN: How to get into the chip industry?

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Re: Ask HN: How to get into the chip industry?

#31

Post by twalla »

chestervonwinch wrote: post #27
formercoder wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny how dropping “guys” is such low hanging D&I fruit but also so hard to do. I try to use “folks” and honestly have started saying y’all a lot.

As someone raised in the north US, living the last ~8 years between Florida and Texas has helped break the “you guys” habit. However, I admit that I still feel like an imposter whenever I use “y’all”.

Y’all is a single syllable, rolls off the tongue and is gender neutral. By the power vested in me by the State of Texas, I hereby grant the reader (herein referred to as “all y’all”) permission to use “y’all” in perpetuity.

Re: Ask HN: How to get into the chip industry?

#32

Post by 10000truths »

dwrodri wrote: post #5

Some of the most fun I have as a graduate student in computer architecture is trying to write the fastest possible code snippets for complicated chips. Working your way "down" from C/C++ is a great place to start, assuming you're familiar with either of those languages. Take some collision detection algorithm for a game or some linear algebra kernel used in your machine learning model of preference. If you're referen…

llvm-mca (https://llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/llvm-mca.html) is an invaluable tool for this, by the way. It has a steep learning curve if you're not familiar with modern CPUs' instruction scheduling/pipelining quirks, but if you really need to micro-optimize some hot spot in your code, it will expose to you all the necessary information to do so. In particular, the timeline view feature visualizes the execution state of a series of instructions quite nicely.

Re: Ask HN: How to get into the chip industry?

#34

Post by JoachimS »

phlipski wrote: post #4

This is like asking, "How do I get into the medical industry?" It's overly broad. There are lots of different jobs in the chip industry. 1. Device engineer - want to build transistors? Grab a physics/chemistry masters and /or PHD. Go to work at a foundry house like TSMC, Samsung, Intel, SMIC or Global Foundries. 2. Analog circuit design - grab a masters in EE (w/ circuit design specialty). 3. Layout - the person who…

11. EDA tool developers. The EDA vendors are huge employers of developers, and esp for backend tools you need not only to be able to deal with algo scalability issues (the datasets are enormous), but also understand more and more of the actual physics, electrical engineering aspects. Very interesting combination.

But also, most customers also develop their own tools, scripts, automation of toolchains etc. And the HW dev toolchains are much bigger than what you have in SW.

At the ASIC shop I used to work (with about 40 engineers) we had 3-4 people full time on tools, environment, methodology.

Re: Ask HN: How to get into the chip industry?

#35

Post by physicsguy »

phlipski wrote: post #4

This is like asking, "How do I get into the medical industry?" It's overly broad. There are lots of different jobs in the chip industry. 1. Device engineer - want to build transistors? Grab a physics/chemistry masters and /or PHD. Go to work at a foundry house like TSMC, Samsung, Intel, SMIC or Global Foundries. 2. Analog circuit design - grab a masters in EE (w/ circuit design specialty). 3. Layout - the person who…

+ then there's things around this like thermal engineer - design verification and simulations.

Re: Ask HN: How to get into the chip industry?

#36

Post by unixhero »

phlipski wrote: post #4

This is like asking, "How do I get into the medical industry?" It's overly broad. There are lots of different jobs in the chip industry. 1. Device engineer - want to build transistors? Grab a physics/chemistry masters and /or PHD. Go to work at a foundry house like TSMC, Samsung, Intel, SMIC or Global Foundries. 2. Analog circuit design - grab a masters in EE (w/ circuit design specialty). 3. Layout - the person who…

All I want is to go to sales expos and wear an Intel tshirt.

Re: Ask HN: How to get into the chip industry?

#38

Post by person_of_color »

dbancajas wrote: post #26
person_of_color wrote: post #9

I work in this field The pay is poor compared to SaaS/AIML/etc Hardware folks (and firmware) are always asking how to retrain and move into mainstream SWE. Its not worth it.

how much is pay in SaaS/AIML? HW can pay 150K+ range with RSUs with PhD EE <5 years YOE. Graduated in "low tech" school. Job security is pretty good because barrier is high, literally you can't get a high school grad to do our job. AI maybe is higher paying but I also see on linked hundreds of people getting laid off during the pandemic becausue they were the first to get cut.

Look up any FAANG role at L4 and you will easily break 300k.

Re: Ask HN: How to get into the chip industry?

#39

Post by amelius »

JoachimS wrote: post #34
phlipski wrote: post #4

This is like asking, "How do I get into the medical industry?" It's overly broad. There are lots of different jobs in the chip industry. 1. Device engineer - want to build transistors? Grab a physics/chemistry masters and /or PHD. Go to work at a foundry house like TSMC, Samsung, Intel, SMIC or Global Foundries. 2. Analog circuit design - grab a masters in EE (w/ circuit design specialty). 3. Layout - the person who…

11. EDA tool developers. The EDA vendors are huge employers of developers, and esp for backend tools you need not only to be able to deal with algo scalability issues (the datasets are enormous), but also understand more and more of the actual physics, electrical engineering aspects. Very interesting combination. But also, most customers also develop their own tools, scripts, automation of toolchains etc. And the HW…

(If you work in EDA, please make your tools more FOSS-friendly. Quality of tooling is quite bad in this respect across the entire industry.)

Re: Ask HN: How to get into the chip industry?

#40

Post by jiveturkey »

dbancajas wrote: post #26
person_of_color wrote: post #9

I work in this field The pay is poor compared to SaaS/AIML/etc Hardware folks (and firmware) are always asking how to retrain and move into mainstream SWE. Its not worth it.

how much is pay in SaaS/AIML? HW can pay 150K+ range with RSUs with PhD EE <5 years YOE. Graduated in "low tech" school. Job security is pretty good because barrier is high, literally you can't get a high school grad to do our job. AI maybe is higher paying but I also see on linked hundreds of people getting laid off during the pandemic becausue they were the first to get cut.

srsly not to be rude but what rock have you been under? PhD 5 YOE $150k????

That's starting salary only (not TC) anywhere in SaaS, 0 YOE fresh BS degree from tier 3 school.

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