So, You WANT a job in VLSI CORE ? 👀 --- You should DEFINTELY OPEN ME!
If
you are reading this article, you have already experienced VLSI in it’s finest.
VLSI or Very Large Scale Integration is a highly technical field. You can assume
it as SPHINX of technology which has wings of programming, head of a researcher
and body of detective and tail of a technician.
These packages are affectionately called “chips”. People love these chips, and these chips like to be addressed as SoC or ASICs.
 |
| IC Design Flow |
VLSI industry is sapiosexual and hence require special understanding and grasp of subjects to be impressed. Entering VLSI industry is tough, but it becomes excruciatingly harder if you don’t know your battle. First step while choosing your battles is to understand the battle ground, knowing your enemy and then prepare your arsenal. As the saying goes, “You don’t bring knives to a gun fight”.
This article aims to give you a perspective of all the major roles you can take up in VLSI. I will be covering all the profiles, their pre-requisites, post-joining efforts, opportunities for growth and various other factors.
.jpg "Various Job Opportunities in VLSI") |
| Various Job Opportunities in VLSI |
Within VLSI industry main technical fields are
1. EDA (Electronic Design Automation)
2. Semiconductor Research
3. Design And Verification
4. Embedded Systems Engineer
🔌EDA (Electronic Design Automation):
By definition Electronic design automation (EDA), also known as
electronic computer-aided design (ECAD), is a type of software that is used
to create and simulate electronic components including integrated circuits
(ICs) and printed circuit boards (PCBs).
The EDA companies offers following roles:
1.
Development: *This role requires you to develop EDA tools used for designing chips, simulation software, etc. Companies like Ansys, Cadence, Mentor Graphics and Synopsys are major players in this domain.
* Requires strong coding skills such as C, C++, data structure and algorithms along with field related subjects.
* Within EDA - engineers works on different tool development i.e. verification tools, infrastructure related automation tools, placement engine, STA (Static Timing Analysis), Extraction, Formal Verification Engines, etc
2. Methodology Development:
* How to use tool and what options in tools are best suited for
designer are fixed by these engineers. They usually create wrappers around
tools so that life for designers becomes easy.
*TCL (tool command language) Perl , Shell scripting are major skills required
for this job. Within methodology there are different areas like Routing,
Placement, Synthesis, STA and Signoff.
3. Application Support (Also known as Application Engineer):
* These engineers directly works with designers on implementing chip, They help
designer in better understanding of tools, work with development team on
implementing new features and communicate problems reported in field to
development side.
* Field Application engineer often travels to customer location to work with
them.
4. Product Engineer:
* Product Engineer is special category of engineer who are responsible for
entire product. They are expected to know In and Out of a EDA tool, Basically
they are first point of contact for any tool issues, They work with development
on creating a solution for common problems.
* These guys often travels to customer location to prove their tools are better
than any other vendor tools (also known as benchmarking)
5. Tool Testers or Validation Engineers:
* These guys makes sure that each tool comes out of EDA industry is tested well
enough, They work as pseudo designers and make sure tool shipped outside EDA is
of good quality
* They usually work on automating testing flow, it's like software testing but
with knowledge of VLSI Chip designing.
- EDA companies pay in comparison to pure SDE profiles and offer you a diverse work environment i.e taste of both the core as well coding profile.
- With this role you sit on the boundaries of CORE and Coding profiles so you can switch to both the core as well as coding companies in future. EDA and Core VLSI companies are limited, but SDE companies are quite a lot. This gives you ample opportunities in future if you would want to switch to any other domain.
- Work Life balance depends upon the company and team but mostly these roles offer good work-life balance.
🔌Semiconductor Research:
This is a very broad area to start with usually engineers in this field work in developing next generation technology node, New technologies like finFET, SOI comes from this team. They mainly deal with fab and runs simulations what effects of changing certain dopant has on chip or manufacturing process, They create models for foundry which later on used as rules for standard cell characterization.- This position requires an MS/PhD degree and requires in-depth knowledge of semiconductor device physics, process, and reliability, as well as circuit design along with strong programming skills.
- This is a niche field and not many high skilled assets are available in the market. This results in highly competitive salaries and highly concentrated nature of work. Here you also have the option to join academia other than switching companies.
- Work Life balance depends upon your nature of research and impact of your project. Hence, this is an elite profile with hard commitments.
🔌Design And Verification:
1. Logic Designer/ RTL Design Engineer :* This person is solely responsible for Designing logic using VHDL, Verilog or any other proprietary language. Sometime company expects these designers to perform logic synthesis on designs that they are working on.
* Major Companies: Samsung, TI, Apple, Cadence, Synopsys, etc. along with various startups. Cadence and Synopsys are acquiring IP design companies to increase their own IP portfolio. IPs are usually like USB interface, Ethernet connection, PCI Express etc. These IPs keep updating based on new technology nodes as well as latest changes.
* Designers are required to be well versed in at-least one HDL language – Verilog or VHDL. They are expected to be aware about the standard protocols like AMBA, PCI, USB, etc. They are expected to have knowledge of ASIC flow, logic circuit designing, LINT, CDC, etc.
2. Physical Design:
* There are various aspects of Physical Design it starts from Synthesis and
goes upto post sign off checks. There are various steps involved in between
such as Placement, Synthesis, STA (at each step), Routing, Post Routing
optimization, Extraction, PDV (Physical Design Verification) Checks.
* There are various sub domains such as analog design, mixed signal design,
Digital design implementation, SRAM or memory cell development. Primary job for
everyone is to meet frequency requirement and make design manufacturable by
adhering to all design rules set to specific technology and foundry.
* It requires good knowledge and hands on experience in EDA tools from Synopsys
, Cadence and Mentor along with floor planning, placement optimizations, CTS
and routing concepts, STA, etc. The engineer is expected to have exposure to various
technologies (7nm/5nm/3nm).
* This is supposedly one of the hardest, effort centric and lucrative job
profiles in Designing and professionals who develop niche in physical design are
rewarded equally well.
3. Standard cell design:
* For digital design standard cells such as NAND, NOR, NOT etc gets developed
based on various foundry specifications such as TSMC, Common Platform, Global Foundry
etc. Every company probably develops it's own form on standard cells, designer
work on layout creating NAND, NOR etc. There are different VT levels gets created
based on design complexity.
* Along with standard requirements for design roles this also requires you to
be well versed with specifics of the role. Eg: SRAM/ RAM designing roles want you
to be well versed with CMOS and complex gate level circuit designs.
* You can pretty much explore all the other design roles with experience in
this role.
4. DFT engineer (Design for testability):
* Once the chip is manufactured in the FAB, it should be tested for
manufacturing defects. DFT engineers add the extra logic into the chip to make
it testable. And they develop the test content to be applied on the tester
(ATE).
* basic requirement for a DFT engineer profile
is a good understanding of Digital Design and CMOS devices.
* You would want to check out this article to understand the role in more depth. (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED) - LINK
5. Verification:
* Verification Engineer provides pseudo inputs and trigger to verify
functionality of design(Remember they don't care about frequency here frequency
is going to meet or not is job of Physical Design Engineers)
* Here the engineer is required to do rigorous testing of the design provided
by the FE team (Frontend design) and you are hunting for bugs and defects in the
design.
*System Verilog, UVM, Vera, OVM , System Verilog Assertions, VHDL, Verilog
languages are used in this domain. Verification engineers are expected to be
well versed with multiple protocols ranging from AMBA, USB, PCI, DDR, etc. Should
be able to think of test scenarios and stimulus to test them.
* The verification engineers are mostly under the gun and expected to be giving
constant feedbacks to frontend engineers about the health of design. Hence,
depending upon the project and delivery deadlines these profiles can become
taxing.
* There are abundance of verification role in the market and depending upon
your experience and knowledge they pay decent salaries. If you develop niche
skills in DV like Formal Verification you can increase your worth otherwise the
salaries won’t change very drastically due to demand and supply.
- Mostly the entry level engineers are offered Design Verification Roles and there is dearth of design roles for entry level engineers (esp. in Indian market for undergrads). For US and other markets there is no such special conditions as mostly the designing is done in the markets outside India and UK. Indian and UK markets are generally used for outsourcing the verification and integration responsibilities. China and Taiwan are used for Foundries and hence they come up with great market for skilled manufacturing engineers.
🔌Manufacturing:
These are actual Hardware side of the VLSI industry. These roles are associated with Foundry and Manufacturing process of Silicon. They are responsible for the manufacturing of actual Silicon chips and wafers. They model devices and confirms the ranges of operation confirming the specifications. Various roles available in the manufacturing are as follows:1. Model Engineer – creates a prototype of the RTL and sends it back to the customer. They translate the RTL code into hardware and make a model.
2. Design Enablement Engineer – They act as communication channel between the customer and the Fab. They constantly collects the feedback and checks whether the model is working fine or not.
3. Research Engineer – physics behind the fabrication.
If you are interested in the given profiles I HIGHLY RECOMMEND checking out the following blog . I have covered the complete strategy to crack VLSI jobs along with thorough notes in this blog. I will be regularly sharing best resources for preparation as well as upskilling. Please share this blog in your network – hopefully this could help someone achieve their dream.
Follow me on LinkedIn and subscribe to this blog to get more insightful content.
Credits and further readings:
1. Which-has-better-career-growth-back-end-vs-front-end-VLSI
2. What-does-the-industry-expect-from-VLSI-verification-engineers-with-different-experience-levels
3. What-are-the-different-types-of-VLSI-designers-and-the-what-are-the-roles-associated-with-them
4. Video1
5. Video2
Comments
Post a Comment