VLSI Career - What kind of job profiles one should expect to get?

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VLSI Is very broad domain as it requires great level of understanding of every part due to strong interdependence of each sub-domain. This mandates that engineers should be able to work on all aspects of design or at least aware of limitation and work flow of all sub-domains.

Following are the top job profiles which can be drawn out of VLSI flow implementation -

Design Engineer - Takes specifications, defines architecture, does circuit design, provide consultancy for layout, tapes out the chip to the foundry, and evaluates the prototype once the chip comes back from the fab.

Verification Engineer - Takes specifications, defines testbench architecture, create test cases, run simulation, provide consultancy to designers to design for enhanced testability, tapes out the chip to the foundry, and evaluates the prototype once the chip comes back from the fab.

Product Engineer: Ensures manufacturability, develops characterization plan, assembly guidelines, develops quality and reliability plan, evaluates the chip with the design and verification engineer, and evaluates the chip through characterization, reliability qualification and manufacturing yield point of view (statistical data analysis). He is responsible for production release and is therefore regarded as a team leader on the project. Post production, he is responsible for customer returns, failure analysis, and corrective actions including design changes.

Test Engineer: Develops test plan for the chip based on specifications and data sheet, creates characterization and production program for the bench test or the ATE (Automatic Test Equipment), designs test board hardware, correlates ATE results with the bench results to validate silicon to compare with simulation results. He works closely with the product engineer to ensure smooth release to production and post release support.

Systems Engineer: Defines new products from system point of view at the customer's end, based on marketing input. He ensures that the chip work in the system designed or used by the customers, and complies with appropriate standards (such as USB, PCI, WiFi etc.). He is responsible for all customer technical support, firmware development, evaluation boards, data sheets and all product documentation such as application notes, trade shows, magazine articles, evaluation reports, software drives and so on.

Foundry Engineer: This is a highly specialized function which involves new wafer process development, device modeling, and lots of research and development projects. He is highly trained in semiconductor device physics area, work with fabs to evaluate their new technologies, willing to experiment, and recommend or drop new technological node for new chips.

Packaging Engineer: This is another highly specialized job function generally part of System Engineering team. He develops precision packaging technology, new package designs for the chips, does the characterization of new packages, and does electrical modeling of the new designs. This is very critical job function where geometries are very small and power surges and system frequencies are very high.

CAD Engineer: This is an engineering function that supports the design engineering function. He is responsible for acquiring, maintaining or developing all CAD tools used by all other VLSI flow engineers. He is supposed to evaluate and integrate new tools in company specific flow. Once integrated, he is suppose to maintain the tools and provide support to engineers if they run into some tool related problem. A CAD engineer needs to be highly skilled in the use of these tools, be able to write software routines to automate as many functions as possible and have a clear understanding of the entire design flow.

VLSI Field is highly technology intensive and dynamic field with great emphasis on research and development. With each quarter technology node is shrinking, new doping strategies and methodologies are taking shape so does new design and implementation flow are making inroads in day-today VLSI design activities. Academia can only teach basics of VLSI but to be successful in once career a person has to undertake exhaustive and current VLSI flow training.

Only a few VLSI Training Institutes like Indian Institute of VLSI Design & Training (IIVDT) has introduced Advanced Diploma in VLSI Design Technology that provides complete ASIC Flow covering most of job profiles listed above. This VLSI Training Course is keeping VLSI Industry demand to bridge Academia-Industry gap and providing highly skilled VLSI professionals which are ready to be productive on day one of hire.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

IIVDT is top VLSI Training Institute in India providing state-of-art Complete VLSI Design flow training on Cadence tools. IIVDT is ranked No 1 among all VLSI Training Institutes in Bangalore due to its rigorous curriculum and highly experienced faculty. Visit www.iivdt.com for more details how you can start on highly rewarding VLSI Career.

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