More signs of a full-fledged semiconductor recovery:
No shortage of openings foreseen at chip makers
By Adam Marcus
EE Times
(05/20/99, 5:54 p.m. EDT)
With the semiconductor industry showing signs of a full recovery, analysts can now luxuriate in the long range.
"We see sales increasing" for chips, said Morry Marshall, vice president of sales and business development for Semico Research Corp. (Phoenix). "That can only be good news for semiconductor engineers. Qualified people will not have any trouble finding a job for the foreseeable future."
Of course, "foreseeable" in high-tech time isn't what it was for, say, Nostradamus. But the current cycle, with its 17 percent growth rate, should last about two or three years, Marshall said. "Engineers have to enter the semiconductor industry realizing [two] things: They have a fairly short half-life; and [the industry] is characterized by a very short marketing cycle," he cautioned. "No engineer should enter the industry thinking they have a lifetime job."
In other words, train, keep up to date and be flexible, Marshall said. That lesson is well-taken for the latest subsector within in the field: system-on-chip. It's an area for which Marshall sees particularly strong job growth. "If you get the system designed, you're going to have to come up with a new system. There's nothing static about the industry."
Slots open
As might be expected, U.S. chip makers have plenty of openings. Starting at the top, Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) has ample positions for engineers across a wide range of the company's operations. You can get inside Intel through its Computing Enhancement Group, for example, a unit based in Austin, Texas. That division is looking for people with skills in digital signal processing, architecture, and logic and circuit design.
Intel also has a slew of slots in its microprocessor group, including high-speed data-path circuit designers, array circuit designers, microprocessor architects and design-validation engineers. In addition to Austin, Intel has many positions in Portland, Ore.; Santa Clara, Calif.; and Phoenix, among other places.
If you prefer working for No. 2, consider Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.). AMD has scores of jobs available in its principal outposts — Austin and Sunnyvale — but it also has posts in Japan and elsewhere. Some of the openings at AMD include 20 posts for process and manufacturing engineers, and at least 10 jobs for software and systems engineers. Most of those are in Texas.
Another chip maker in a hiring mood is Micron Technology Inc. (Boise, Idaho), which already employs more than 7,000 and plans to add to that figure. The company's job postings include a PC motherboard design engineer and a software/CAD engineer. The first opening, in Micron's Crucial Technology Division, calls for a pc-board layout designer with five years of experience and a BSEE or BSCE. The second job, in the company's CAD tape-out group, requires developers versed in C, Perl, Lisp or Skill.
Micron is also hiring SRAM design engineers. Candidates should have two to seven years of experience in SRAM design and between three and 10 years overall in the industry. Qualified applicants should have a background in Unix, Cadence DF2, Hspice, ADM and LVS, along with a thorough background in SRAM support-circuitry design, as well as high-speed circuit-design and advanced clocking schemes.
Moto, Harris looking
Motorola has more than 130 openings, in everything from fabrication to hardware engineering, at its facilities in Austin; San Jose, Calif.; Atlanta; and Leesburg, Va., as well as its Schaumburg, Ill., headquarters. Harris Semiconductor also needs engineers, though not as many as some of its larger rivals.
Smaller chip companies, too, are expanding their acts. Genesis Microchip Inc. (Markham, Ontario) is looking to fill positions for analog and mixed-signal IC designers, as well as VLSI and ASIC specialists.
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