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.
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.
>> 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.
>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.
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.
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
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.
You missed the part where they do it for a fraction of the salary.
I suggest there's a kind of 'cultural imperative' in Korea that is so different from the US that it doesn't even begin to factor into our equations.
My Korean grad school colleagues went to intern at Samsung for serf pay, the only way that could work is if there was some kind of culturally implied merit.
The US also needs a 'different kind of ethos' to compete in semiconductor, Cali Surfer Vibes won't cut it, neither will NY banker vibes, neither will SF Social Media AI Allbirds vibes, nor Cambridge High Intellectual Healthcare Conference vibes, nor Texas Energy Industry or DC Government Consultant etc..
And that will be impossible without a fair number of migrants who will be mostly Asian - so where is this going to happen?
Maybe they need a 'New South Valley' about 50Km south of San Jose, a cross between Orange County, Silicon Valley, Cambridge, and Seoul aka Cali, but slightly more formally regimented, a bit like the actual old-school Silicon Valley which was at the time, away from the buzz, a bit of a sleepy burb where people focused on hard stuff and economics mattered.
> the stakes are way too high to allow everyone a chance to play cowboy with the tools
This is really what pushed me into just doing digital design as a hobby and making my money elsewhere. It's understandable that chips companies are so risk averse (a bad tapeout or, worse, a major escape can cost the company billions) but it is really a miserable experience to have so much passion and ambition but never being able to do anything other than extremely conservative incremental changes over a decades long career.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
In other countries, with less technical jobs, this effect applies to all kind to technical fields.
You go to an electronics engineering class. There are a few superbrilliant people. The rest are quite clever though.
As there are a few jobs available for the technical skills that you learn at class, only the superbrilliant get those jobs.
It turns out that the companies say to these superbrilliant guys: "I am giving you a unique opportunity to work in this top field in this country. So your salary is not about money, but motivation".
End of the story: the rest of the guys, not the super brilliant, end up working in more generic stuff like management, consultancy, generic simple software.... And they make way more money that the superbrilliant guys.
These examples are taken from Spain. Althoug I have seen similar in other European countries with more technical jobs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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".
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.
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
The professor told them after they already invested years, they will end up unemployed. They did not, because their skillset was valuable somewhere else.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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
Sounds like a great way of nurturing talent... not. Apparently they will only look at your CV if you have a PhD or a very specialized MsC
And all this for what again? "The privilege of working with hard problems?!" I've done enough C already and that makes my head hurt now. Thanks but I think I'll take it easier with "higher level software" while making more money and having less stress
Top engineering school hazing, creating underpaid and not quite mentally balanced people
How many people do you think exist on earth that could build a usable but most minimal form of computer/computation from scratch? Roughly same utility just lowered expectations on horsepower with also the assumption the software would be better optimized.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Last I checked, they generally do 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Agree completely. High specialization towards physics and science weeds out other brain types that may have a lot to offer. Trades generally don't do that
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I suggest there's a kind of 'cultural imperative' in Korea that is so different from the US that it doesn't even begin to factor into our equations.
My Korean grad school colleagues went to intern at Samsung for serf pay, the only way that could work is if there was some kind of culturally implied merit.
The US also needs a 'different kind of ethos' to compete in semiconductor, Cali Surfer Vibes won't cut it, neither will NY banker vibes, neither will SF Social Media AI Allbirds vibes, nor Cambridge High Intellectual Healthcare Conference vibes, nor Texas Energy Industry or DC Government Consultant etc..
And that will be impossible without a fair number of migrants who will be mostly Asian - so where is this going to happen?
Maybe they need a 'New South Valley' about 50Km south of San Jose, a cross between Orange County, Silicon Valley, Cambridge, and Seoul aka Cali, but slightly more formally regimented, a bit like the actual old-school Silicon Valley which was at the time, away from the buzz, a bit of a sleepy burb where people focused on hard stuff and economics mattered.
This is really what pushed me into just doing digital design as a hobby and making my money elsewhere. It's understandable that chips companies are so risk averse (a bad tapeout or, worse, a major escape can cost the company billions) but it is really a miserable experience to have so much passion and ambition but never being able to do anything other than extremely conservative incremental changes over a decades long career.
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.
It's sad seeing this practice repeated. And people falling for that.
Didn't take EE in the US, but your statement here seems to be universal. Especially true about Analog professors being gatekeeping jerks.
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.
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.
What were those signs?
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.
You go to an electronics engineering class. There are a few superbrilliant people. The rest are quite clever though.
As there are a few jobs available for the technical skills that you learn at class, only the superbrilliant get those jobs.
It turns out that the companies say to these superbrilliant guys: "I am giving you a unique opportunity to work in this top field in this country. So your salary is not about money, but motivation".
End of the story: the rest of the guys, not the super brilliant, end up working in more generic stuff like management, consultancy, generic simple software.... And they make way more money that the superbrilliant guys.
These examples are taken from Spain. Althoug I have seen similar in other European countries with more technical jobs.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
Could be a Hollywood movie, if you fill in the gap between the penultimate and ultimate paragraphs with some interesting action
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".
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.
Sounds like a great way of nurturing talent... not. Apparently they will only look at your CV if you have a PhD or a very specialized MsC
And all this for what again? "The privilege of working with hard problems?!" I've done enough C already and that makes my head hurt now. Thanks but I think I'll take it easier with "higher level software" while making more money and having less stress
Top engineering school hazing, creating underpaid and not quite mentally balanced people
Why ? So much software is far less complex to design than semiconductor stuff
I wish I could have seen this when I was in school.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Probably would just drop the salaries to minimum wage :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Lots of us left the field or retired. Call us when semiconductor companies start paying real money.
> 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.
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.
Last I checked, they generally do 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.
Source: their (outsourced) recruiters admitting this to me.
unfortunately you can't expect people as individuals to make those calls. You need mechanisms that properly value long-term sustainability
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.
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
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.
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.