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Purdue Starts Comprehensive Semiconductor Degree Programs in U.S.

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Re: Purdue Starts Comprehensive Semiconductor Degree Programs in U.S.

#131

Post by dinvlad »

Hammershaft wrote: post #111
Melatonic wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This honestly sounds like there is some real shady shit going on behind the scenes by the heads of these two companies. Reminds me of the whole VFX / software engineering union debacle with Steve Jobs / Lucas / etc that eventually came out and was super duper illegal.

Amazing, so Steve Jobs was involved in TWO conspiracies to fix wages!? https://www.cgw.com/Press-Center/News/2014/Studios-Accused-o... https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/04/apple-googl... How about instead of idolizing people like this we charge them with felonies and put them in prison?

Meaty! Thanks for sharing.. At this point, it's pretty clear universally everyone within the top management ranks of big companies are sociopaths with money mania. All while feeding the lower ranks and the public beautiful stories about their juggernauts and the humble beginnings.

Re: Purdue Starts Comprehensive Semiconductor Degree Programs in U.S.

#132

Post by fnordpiglet »

irrational wrote: post #103
nurspouse wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Intel, and with process/fab people for a number of years. Everything you're seeing in the comments is true. Compensation is not that bad. Clearly, it'll not pay SW salaries - no engineering does. But if you're a fab person, you'll work long hours, be on call often (and you will get woken up often), and eventually will own a tool that you'll be responsible for, even when not on call. Lots of abusive and pa…

> Clearly, it'll not pay SW salaries - no engineering does. For some reason, I assumed that in order to be a chip designer you had to be as good at programming as a developer. Then I became friends with two intel chip designers/engineers and was surprised that neither knew much of anything about programming, despite both having multiple PhDs in their fields. That's when I began realizing that engineering and programm…

Most EE’s program almost exclusively

Re: Purdue Starts Comprehensive Semiconductor Degree Programs in U.S.

#133

Post by lcvw »

bluelan949 wrote: post #40
rockostrich wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went into a master's program at SUNY CNSE back in 2014 for "nanoscale engineering" hoping to do some research in MEMS/NEMS. Turns out there were no research spots available with the groups working on that stuff so I ended up in a group working on EUV photoresists. I ended up not doing much actual "nanoscale research" and mostly just did some data science/engineering for the group since all the data processing code…

Likewise, I graduated from a very similar program to CNSE. It was a program attached to the main engineering school. The work seemed so interesting and I felt I would end up doing impactful research. That was until I did an internship following a grad student doing work on solar cells. Every day was sitting 8+ hours in one room doing CVD then XRD. It was soul crushing. I realized the program was more of a PhD-prep pr…

Intel (and similar fab companies as well) is famous for even treating it’s phds as menial process engineers. When I graduated the only Intel fab jobs I was qualified for were in Indonesia or some other SE Asian country, and descriptions were basically “you are the SEM person, you do SEM all day.”

I know a surprising amount of people who came out of CNSE (without following up with grad school) and are now landscapers, waiters, or similar. The skillset is so specialized as to be almost worthless unless you can find the right role imo. Also the program there CNSE/SUNY Poly is absolute hot garbage, I advise active looking at this field to go into conventional EE, ChemE, or Materials.

Re: Purdue Starts Comprehensive Semiconductor Degree Programs in U.S.

#134

Post by FPGAhacker »

irrational wrote: post #103
nurspouse wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Intel, and with process/fab people for a number of years. Everything you're seeing in the comments is true. Compensation is not that bad. Clearly, it'll not pay SW salaries - no engineering does. But if you're a fab person, you'll work long hours, be on call often (and you will get woken up often), and eventually will own a tool that you'll be responsible for, even when not on call. Lots of abusive and pa…

> Clearly, it'll not pay SW salaries - no engineering does. For some reason, I assumed that in order to be a chip designer you had to be as good at programming as a developer. Then I became friends with two intel chip designers/engineers and was surprised that neither knew much of anything about programming, despite both having multiple PhDs in their fields. That's when I began realizing that engineering and programm…

In my experience, programming is something you can get pretty far learning on your own. In grade school. I’m not talking about red-black trees or computer sciencey things, but you can definitely get started making games of varying complexity when you are 10 years old or younger.

Things you can build and see and have immediate feedback.

That just doesn’t happen with chip design. Not that it can’t, and I’m sure there are examples (Woz’s paper and pencil circuit design come to mind) but it’s far from common, compared to coding.

I remember in 5th grade being asked to help another student write a choose-your-own-adventure style game in basic on an apple //e back in the “one per classroom if you are lucky” days.

I figured I was going to be a programmer as a profession but college came around and it was a coin toss for me between computer engineering and computer science. At the time, engineers made more money so I went with that. Doubled as an EE/CE. I was ok at the typical EE stuff, better at the little bit of programming we were exposed to (in pascal). I did very well in semiconductor physics, but I didn’t really get sucked into it. Got to a digital design class, and that hit the spot for me. I didn’t like plugging wires in on breadboards because it was entirely too frustrating trying to figure out which wire you got wrong, plus I’m colorblind and the shades of red and green insulation on wires are perfectly impossible for me to tell apart except under very very bright light. But I loved designing the synchronous digital logic.

It’s just not something you are super likely to randomly pick up on your own at an early age. And to be honest, even if I had been exposed to digital design back in grade school, I doubt it would have resonated. I could easily understand things like “GOTO 10.” Understanding clocked logic, or binary arithmetic probably wasn’t within my reach back then.

Nearly all of the EEs in my class had never programmed anything before the 2 classes in our curriculum. All the people that knew how to program went into CS (except for a few like me). So the few logic designers that come out of an EE program don’t seem very likely to be good at programming. Just different interests.

Re: Purdue Starts Comprehensive Semiconductor Degree Programs in U.S.

#135

Post by theflyinghorse »

greggman3 wrote: post #110
irrational wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Clearly, it'll not pay SW salaries - no engineering does. For some reason, I assumed that in order to be a chip designer you had to be as good at programming as a developer. Then I became friends with two intel chip designers/engineers and was surprised that neither knew much of anything about programming, despite both having multiple PhDs in their fields. That's when I began realizing that engineering and programm…

Not the same thing but ... In my experience, most browser developers (who write C++) don't know web development. In fact most of them disdane it, or at least that's how it feels. I find it kind of sad though I also understand it as I had the same attitude for the first 2~3 of years.

That is so odd. You're telling us the people who make these tools don't use their own tools, moreover they have disdain for the users of the tools they make?

Re: Purdue Starts Comprehensive Semiconductor Degree Programs in U.S.

#136

Post by pineconewarrior »

theflyinghorse wrote: post #135
greggman3 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the same thing but ... In my experience, most browser developers (who write C++) don't know web development. In fact most of them disdane it, or at least that's how it feels. I find it kind of sad though I also understand it as I had the same attitude for the first 2~3 of years.

That is so odd. You're telling us the people who make these tools don't use their own tools, moreover they have disdain for the users of the tools they make?

Not op, but I think it's more a case like this:

Folks who work on Chromium think little of those who wrangle wordpress themes

Re: Purdue Starts Comprehensive Semiconductor Degree Programs in U.S.

#137

Post by wcunning »

nickelpro wrote: post #123
Gollapalli wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is OSU Oklahoma or Ohio?

Oklahoma. I'm actually working with a kid from Ohio State who's constantly ragging on their program for not even teaching Verilog much less how to build an ASIC. Purdue's program is ok , but it's a veritable bastion of academic excellence compared to schools that have no staff that have ever performed a tapeout, which is most of them. Electrical Engineering departments have tons of faculty who know what they're talki…

Look at the people around SiFive and RISC-V at UC-Berkeley and look at the transistor guys at UMich. Both groups do lots of work that directly tapes out or works with companies who do. My digital logic prof at UMich took sabbatical to do a startup that netted him a bunch of money on… I forget the details now, but they did a smaller tape out to prove the concept before selling to Intel. It’s not that uncommon.

Re: Purdue Starts Comprehensive Semiconductor Degree Programs in U.S.

#138

Post by hackernews1134 »

lcvw wrote: post #133
bluelan949 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise, I graduated from a very similar program to CNSE. It was a program attached to the main engineering school. The work seemed so interesting and I felt I would end up doing impactful research. That was until I did an internship following a grad student doing work on solar cells. Every day was sitting 8+ hours in one room doing CVD then XRD. It was soul crushing. I realized the program was more of a PhD-prep pr…

Intel (and similar fab companies as well) is famous for even treating it’s phds as menial process engineers. When I graduated the only Intel fab jobs I was qualified for were in Indonesia or some other SE Asian country, and descriptions were basically “you are the SEM person, you do SEM all day.” I know a surprising amount of people who came out of CNSE (without following up with grad school) and are now landscapers,…

What is SEM? What does doing SEM all day entail?

Re: Purdue Starts Comprehensive Semiconductor Degree Programs in U.S.

#139

Post by nickelpro »

wcunning wrote: post #137
nickelpro wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oklahoma. I'm actually working with a kid from Ohio State who's constantly ragging on their program for not even teaching Verilog much less how to build an ASIC. Purdue's program is ok , but it's a veritable bastion of academic excellence compared to schools that have no staff that have ever performed a tapeout, which is most of them. Electrical Engineering departments have tons of faculty who know what they're talki…

Look at the people around SiFive and RISC-V at UC-Berkeley and look at the transistor guys at UMich. Both groups do lots of work that directly tapes out or works with companies who do. My digital logic prof at UMich took sabbatical to do a startup that netted him a bunch of money on… I forget the details now, but they did a smaller tape out to prove the concept before selling to Intel. It’s not that uncommon.

UCB and UM are top 5 schools for this, with maybe MIT sitting above them because of Lincoln Lab. UCB literally invented RISCV (among a million other fundamental CS and CE technologies). They are not representative of the typical state school or even well funded private schools.

I'm at NYU Tandon and they are a decade behind on most stuff, the single VLSI course is an elective even for ECEs. I work with students from state schools all across the country, and the most common reaction I get with rising seniors coming from EE and ECE programs is "I have never seen any of this stuff before".

What I'm trying to say is: I've yet to meet an ECE senior who couldn't write Hello World in C or perform linear DC analysis, but it's surprisingly rare to find one who can layout a ring oscillator.

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